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has a habit of defying the odds. Brother-and-sister team Mark and Nancy Rohlfs founded the plastics shop just before the Great Recession and moved into a new building just as the COVID-19 lockdowns began. But this team and their shop have thrived during that time, expanding to its current 34 machine tools and a square footage ten times as large as its starting point in Mark Rohlfs’ garage and basement.

In this episode of View From My Shop, we’ll take a look at how this shop has carefully cultivated its current machines, why Connecticut was the best place to found East Coast Precision, and why initial recruitment isn’t the shop’s primary concern — but retention.

Transcript:

Evan Doran (Associate Editor, 91ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ÎÛ): Ingenuity, resourcefulness, a knack for spotting under-exploited opportunities.

Mark Rohlfs (Co-Owner and President, East Coast Precision Manufacturing): We have mix, so our quantities run from 50 pieces to 40,000 pieces.

Evan: These are some of the key traits that can help a job shop thrive, and which brother and sister team Marc and Nancy Rohlfs have leveraged to build their plastics machining shop, East Coast Precision Manufacturing. But what does that mean in practical terms? Join us in this episode of “View from My Shop” as we take to the shop floor to find out.

Mark: We worked for our father. We decided to go our separate ways. I was a machinist that had worked for him since I was 15 years old. In his shop, I did everything. I did quoting, I did machining. When we decided to go our separate ways, I talked to Nancy. She had done some of the bookkeeping, and I said, "Would you like to go? I'm going to start a business." I knew what machines I could buy. I purchased one of them. She said, "Okay." And so, on January 1st of 2006, we started our business.

Nancy Rohlfs (Co-Owner and Treasurer, East Coast Precision Manufacturing): I had to learn how to develop a website. I had to learn how to get various forms of advertising for us so that we could start getting business in, which was most important. We knew how to make the parts, but we had to get the business to start making the parts.

Mark: We started in my garage and basement, just machining plastic parts. We had two employees back then, me and my brother-in-law. We've since grown to 10,000 square feet and 32 CNC machines. We have Swiss screw machines here. We have machining centers down over there. We have some turning centers down in here. Two-axis lathes. Again, we just machine plastics.

Nancy: I think we found our niche, and Mark can talk about this, where we are working on hard-to-machine plastics.

Mark: Yes, and expensive plastics. We have some parts down here that are made out of Vespel. We have this little guy right here. It's very small. It's got a five-thousandths hole in it. No burrs. It has to be clean and clear. It's something we do. Well, that's our niche — very small insulators for the semiconductor and medical industries.

Here's another grouping of parts that are coming off of this machine. You can see how clean. There's no oils. We run a water-based coolant. We have measuring instruments right at the bench so that the machinist can do the measuring right at the bench.

Nancy: We found that Connecticut was a good place for us to start our business. It has a long history of manufacturing with Sikorsky and Electric Boat General Dynamics. Connecticut has a very good system of technical high schools and community colleges that we can work with to get our employees and to hire young people to start learning the machine shop business here.

Mark: New England, in general, provides a very good — a lot of our customers are other machine shops around New England. Because they'll get orders for — they mostly machine metals. But then they might have one of their customers have a couple of plastic parts that they need made. It's easier for them to subcontract it out. They don't have to change the coolant in their machines. They don't have to learn the specifics of machining plastic.

Let me show you some other parts that we're making here. This is one of our very small insulators that we're making right here. Can you see those in the cup? Now, that looks like a round disc, but — it's actually a round disc, but it has with two trepan counterbores in both sides. The tolerancing is very close, plus or minus five-tenths on all things. And measuring it, just measuring it is a very difficult thing, but we have techniques here. And we have skilled people that are veterans who can do this type of work.

This is something we started at another shop in 2000, and we had struggled to measure them and make them. It took several years of development to get it. The other thing is catching this in this machine — it would be lost. But we have special catching techniques, and we can catch that part.

Nancy: This is a brand new building that Mark and I actually bought right before COVID hit. We thought we had made a huge mistake, but it actually turned out to be good for us to be able to renovate during COVID.

Mark: And unlike other shops, we're actually standing in our office right now. I'm the owner, and I do all the quoting. I do the machining. I do some of the programming, and I don't have an office. This is my office. My desk is right over here. And one of my other employees that does some of the quoting also, his office is right here. So we're right on the floor, and we're in the trenches with them.

So these are our machining centers here. We have them all lined up so one person can run multiple machines. And it's in a compact, organized area. As you can see, we have 15 RoboDrills in this small area.

Nowadays, you can buy a used machine. I bought a machine over there for $8,000, and I think I've gotten $1 million or more of profit off of that. The return on investment is just incredible. Machines are really cheap, comparatively, and manufacturing has come so far that you can outfit your place with a lot of machines. It's not like years ago, where it was so expensive that you added on very slowly. So we buy a lot of used machines and refurbish them.

Nancy: That worked out for us with the Citizens that we found.

Mark: But most of our machines in here are used, and we've bought maybe six, seven, or eight brand new. The reason why we go to brand new is we just happened to get a job that we needed a machine for, and it was going to run long, so we knew we would get the return on investment in a short order. So we were able to — we did it for that reason.

And then, whether that job is still running or not — I know one of our customers is still going on a brand-new machine that we bought in 2008. Every once in a while, we buy a brand-new machine because there's not a used one available on the market when we need it.

And then down here, we have our turning centers. We have a few turning centers. This is where we do parts complete off of the lathe. We have three turning centers right here. And a lot of times, we can get the part to come off complete.

Yeah. Many, many parts run in the two-axis, and then would go into a mill for a second operation. We bundle that all together in our turning centers, so the parts come off complete. This makes them more accurate and results in a better quality part all-around.

But these two parts, that's Ultem-1000. And you can see the nice finish from our polishing that we get on that. I don't know if my fingers are what you want, but the parts certainly are. Then this one here is polycarbonate and we polished that one also. And you can see how sparkly it is. Customers love that. But medical customers need that [finish] so that whatever fluid they're running through it when they go to clean the part, when they go to clean the medical device, it's cleaned easier.

This is our Keyence system, which we do some of our inspection work. It gives us — it's a vision system — it gives us the data. Right now we have a little part set up on there. It's checking it. And we're going through this bag probably. And checking some dimensions. It gives all dimensions. On this particular part it works very well for the diameters.

Nancy: This is our shipping area — and our deburring area and our polishing area. [It’s] kind of a separate area that we wanted to — you can see that our shop is very open. But we wanted to put the walls here because our plastics, once they're complete and once we've — we have our the wash cleaning station — once we've washed them, we like to put them in the plastic bags. We don't want any contaminants coming in from other parts of the shop, so this room is kept a little bit sealed off from the rest of the shop.

Lily Cummings (Machinist, East Coast Precision Manufacturing): My name is Lily Cummings. I work here at East Coast Precision. I kind of do a little bit of everything around here. I do lathe [work], I also debur. That's how I started out here. And I also work in the mill, and I run the surface grinder, preparing our material for the lathe. Pretty much daily, I’ll run about one to three machines every day. I kind of jump around — a lot of these will run by themselves. We've got plenty of different cycle times.

I learned everything I know on the job. I like I said, I'd never did any sort of machining. I used to work in manufacturing previously, but as our needs sort of shifted, I ended up over here in the lathe. Now I've learned how to set up operate, and now I'm working on learning how to program. So there's lots of opportunities here, lots of different things to do. Always busy, always learning.

Mark: I think it's important to note that it's a recruitment — and I've heard this for years. Like “What? What is the biggest problem?” And they put out surveys, “What's the biggest problem?” Getting people, okay? They — “Oh, there's not enough people.” I don't think, for us, it's hard enough getting people. It's — it's once you get them, to retain them is the important piece. There is — for the amount that our company has grown and the speed, we can get people, it's a matter of retaining them. So that's more the key piece.

If we work it from backwards, we don't need a flood of people and then have them come in and go right back out again. We need one good person, once a year. That'll do it, you know? You know, or two good people. You have to be selective, then you have to hold them at the — and we try to do everything we can to make East Coast a comfortable, and low-stress working environment.

Brent Donaldson (Editor-in-Chief, 91ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ÎÛ): Hey everybody, Brant Donaldson with 91ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ÎÛ here. If you just watched that video and thought, “I’d love for my shop to be featured in The View From My Shop series,” then send us an email at shopvideo@mmsonline.com and tell us what sets your shop apart.