The new facility is more than four times as large as the original building and includes office space as well. The site is also large enough for future expansion.
industry, was on the ropes. It eventually filed for reorganization in bankruptcy court.
“They were trying to reduce headcount pretty drastically, especially in the tooling area, where we worked,” said Carney. He took a buyout and his parents took retirement. They went
“After working for us a year and a half and showing a great deal of promise,” Carney said, “my mom and dad wanted to get away from owning the business, made an offer for Brian and me to buy out their portion of the business. Brian and I took it over on a 50-50 basis in 2011.”
“We have a wide range of customers so we work with a wide range of material.”
into the family business full time. “We had a decent baseline of work [in the shop] to go ahead and try to make it on our own, sink or swim.” (Ironically, a vestige of the Carneys’ for- mer employer made it through the tough times and now is one of C-E’s core customers.)
Enter Echelbarger
Brian Echelbarger also worked at the auto supplier and took a buyout about the same time. Eventually he came to work for the Carneys.
By this time the company, now known as Carney-Ech- elbarger Machining, had added a lot of capability. The facility was now home to not just the equipment it started out with, but at least a dozen more machines, including a second Fadal VMC, a Star 32-mm Swiss lathe, an AmeraSeiki C&C lathe, two wire EDMs, two ram EDMs, three drill presses, a vertical cutoff saw and a vibratory tumbler and a wide variety of measuring equipment. It was also able to deal with a very broad range of materials, ranging from the relatively soft (plastics) to the very hard (titanium and other exotic metals).