“When things started coming in the door and especially when the economy got tougher,” said Carney, “we realized that we shouldn’t limit ourselves on anything, especially materials. It’s very rare when a customer comes to us with something that we haven’t already machined at some point and that we won’t machine. It was out of necessity more than anything. We have a wide range of customers so we work with a wide range of material. My mom and I and Brian all come from a model maker background, so we have a lot experience working with plastics and also in making molds.”
A Full-Service Shop
Experience also allowed (and allows) C-E to be a full- service CNC machine shop. The company provides not just machining but also design, engineering, prototyping, inspec- tion and assembly services. Fabrication is part of what they offer as well, including welding and CNC bending. “A lot of the design and engineering comes from our previ- ous employment,” Carney said. “I went to Purdue for mechani-
There Is an Alternative...
cal engineering. In addition, we’ve had on-the-job training on CAD/CAM for years and years now. Our top five people are very well versed in design and engineering as well as metallurgy. We had to learn as we went. It also helped that we worked hand in hand with a lot of engineers on a daily basis. We definitely do have a pretty wide range of skill sets with our core employees.”
A Diversified Customer Base
The experience was bolstered by and helped attract a diversified core customer base. In addition to its original robot- ics and automotive customers, C-E has added an orthopedics company and a defense contractor to its list. It also makes parts for machine tools that Robert Bosch manufactures for use in a facility in South Carolina. “The parts,” said Carney, “are for machines that are
[Bosch’s] own design. We’ve made a lot of subassemblies such as for pick-and-place systems. The orthopedic side is mostly fixturing and test fixtures for the company to test its product that ends up inside somebody. The automotive stuff is mostly prototype machining of parts that will be cast when they go into production. The customer wants to see what the parts will look like and make sure that they’ll work before they send them out to be cast. The defense work is all over the place. Some of what we make goes to an end user and some is used to build up other products.”
“The first four years were pretty easy. It was just me, my mom and my dad."
Tired of wrestling with heavy, cumbersome loads? Airfloat technology provides a safer,
less costly & more ergonomic alternative to traditional
Until recently, all this activity based on diversification born of necessity took place in C-E’s compact, crowded birthplace. “The first four years were pretty easy,” Carney said. “It was just me, my mom and my dad. It was not too big of a deal as far as being on top of each other. But once we started get- ting more and more busy and everything was running all the time it got really difficult. You really had to like who you were working with. I don’t think you could pass by someone without touching each other. But it made it nice for changing parts on multiple machines because you only had to take one step in any direction.”
Time for a Change “We felt we were at maximum output in the previous building,” said Carney. “We had enough work coming from