Rain rider: JDA Aqua Cutting and JDA Custom offer both machining services and motorcycle-related products

The manufacturing industry has a long tradition of machine shop employees wanting to be their own boss and starting their own shops. Gary Lee took a similar path but with a twist.

At the age of 20, after having worked at a foundry, he became the 12th employee at an Illinois machine shop and, over the next 15 years, ran the purchasing department, helping the shop grow into a $30 million company with more 100 employees.

All images courtesy of A. Richter, except as indicated

In addition to waterjet machines, JDA operates CNC milling and turning machines, such as this Hurco lathe operated by Karl Gruszkowski.

Gary Lee (left), president of JDA Aqua Cutting and JDA Custom, says his son Joshua, vice president, has played an instrumental role since the shops’ beginning.

However, by then, Lee said he was “bored to death” and wanted to take his enthusiasm for manufacturing and make money on his own. “By the time I was 35, there was nowhere for me to go there because it was a family-run business and their kids were coming in.”

But rather than establishing a shop to machine jobs similar to those tackled by his previous employer, Lee launched JDA Aqua Cutting Inc. in 1995 in New Lenox, Ill., becoming one of the early adopters of waterjet cutting in the Chicago area. He started with a high-rail gantry waterjet machine from Chukar WaterJet and a 55,000-psi, 50-hp intensifier pump from St. Michael, Minn.-based Jet Edge Inc., which acquired Chukar in 1998. Lee added that the tools he needed for general operations came from his garage.

Those tools have been replaced, but that waterjet machine—as well as a second Jet Edge high-rail gantry waterjet with a 75-hp intensifier pump the shop purchased about 4 years later—haven’t. “We’ve had pretty good luck with them,” Lee said, adding that JDA Aqua Cutting performs all machine maintenance and repair in-house, with Jet Edge providing consultation.

Although business was modest at first, word began to spread about the company’s capabilities to accurately, productively and intricately waterjet-cut virtually any material, with or without the use of abrasive garnet. “Within 2 years, our business started going nuts,” Lee said.

Family Roots

The letters JDA in the company’s name represent the initials of Gary and LaSondra Lee’s three sons: Joshua, Daniel and Andrew. The Lees also have a daughter, Rachel, the youngest, but felt the three-letter acronym looked and sounded better than one with four.

Lee instructs his children to “do what you want in this world,” and, for the majority, that doesn’t include machining. The exception is Joshua, who started working at the shop while still a freshman at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he received a baseball scholarship and earned engineering degrees. “He was coming in nearly 40 hours a week and helping me,” Lee said, adding that Joshua now basically runs the 13,000-sq.-ft. shop.

JDA Aqua Cutting operates its Jet Edge waterjet machines up to 15 hours a day, 6 days a week.

JDA Aqua Cutting still runs the first waterjet machine it purchased in 1995.

To help smooth the cyclic nature of the job shop business, especially after the slowdown caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the shop sought to develop its own product line. Lee noted JDA produced radius walkways components and other parts for the destroyed World Trade Center. What the nature of that line should be was elusive until Joshua made a chain guard for his motorcycle and a friend requested one for his bike as well. As a result, the Lees decided to produce custom parts for sport motorcycles and started JDA Custom. “We have about 3,800 part numbers and ship parts all over the world,” Gary Lee said about the JDA Custom line.

The bike parts are typically machined from bar stock and the company purchased a Hurco CNC lathe to complement its existing Hurco CNC mills and enable machining of all the required bike part features and enhance its job shop capabilities, Lee noted. He added that about 65 percent of the business is job shop work, with the remainder being for JDA Custom, which slows a bit during winter.

The two sides of JDA share the machine tools, with the waterjet machines often roughing parts for finishing on the milling machines. In addition to machining, including sawing, JDA performs forming/bending, welding, vibratory deburring and other finishing processes, and provides design and engineering services. According to Lee, the only outsourced work is plating and heat treating—even part and motorcycle photography is done in-house.