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For decades, Tom Libera stood securely on the first rung of the industrial ladder.
His modest one-story shop, J & T Tool and Die, is surrounded by empty fields, at the bottom of Saginaw Bay just out of town.
The center of his business is shaping certain auto parts to the fine allowances now demanded by the industry. But he also makes, among other things, forms for rifle triggers, little bronze pellets utilized in snowmaking machines, blades utilized in tank engines. If working on a factory line could be a deadly boring existence, being a tool and die guy is a lot more rewarding.
You have to be somewhat creative.”
A customer presents him with a shape. Mr. Libera finds a way to bring it to life. During the span of his 23-year career, he has puzzled over how better to fashion thousands of new widgets for dozens of distinct customers.
In Michigan, you’ll find a huge selection of tool and die shops of varying sizes. But the future of the smallest ones, like Mr. Libera’s, is in uncertainty these days. Most of the business comes in the advance auto parts promo code monster jam industry and that presents a difficulty. For decades, the Big Three automakers have been under withering pressure from abroad, competition that has merely intensified recently as the weak euro and yen have provided powerful cost edges for the likes of Volkswagen and Toyota.
This will not make for a hospitable environment for the family-run enterprise.
Nationwide, the tool and die industry, which is an important portion of the overall machine tool industry, peaked in the spring of 1998, as bull market generation was fully revving. Machine tool orders reached $650 billion, according to data from Comerica Bank. Subsequently, the recession hit. By the middle of this past year, orders were down to about $200 billion.
It’s this that capital spending is all about.”
Having bottomed out, a recovery in capital spending is expected to commence. Ford and Chrysler, now a unit of DaimlerChrysler, lost almost $7.5 billion between them last year, while G.M. edged out a gain.
Several of the wear shows already. You’ll find now 965 tool and die shops in the state, about 100 less than five years back, according to HarrisInfoSource, a publishing and research company that compiles Michigan industrial statistics.
Three years back, Mr. Libera’s shop had nine workers. Now, he’s down to only two, and his is a common narrative.
Everybody’s in the same boat.”
Tool and die makers create tools for machines, like drill bits, or refine parts made by larger providers. They produce some components themselves and also make forms that can be utilized to cast all manner of metal and plastic products.
In Michigan, these stores have names that sound chiseled from Vulcan’s forge. Acme Tool and Die.
Mr. Libera, a dad of two, can attest to that. He is lean and stands 6 feet 6 inches tall.
He’s deep roots as a G.M. loyalist. His mom worked at a G.M. plant farther up state Highway 15 for 41 years. His dad worked at a G.M. plant to the south that’s now part of Delphi, G.M.’s enormous supply business that was spun off in 1998.
Guys like him don’t buy Ford, partially for faithfulness and partially because he gets a discount as a supplier. Three pickup trucks, all from G.M.’s Chevrolet office, sit in his parking lot.
But he recognizes that his shop is caught up in powerful historical powers. Even by the end of the 1970’s, when Mr. Libera couldn’t get a G.M. occupation, the vision of endless American advance auto parts monster jam coupon houston supremacy was already beginning to fade. He apprenticed at another local tool and die manufacturer, saved up, sold his Chevy and spent $50,000 to buy a lathe, a milling machine and an electrical saw.
His family connections helped get him G.M. work that continues to this day. He recently ended helping to tool camshafts that were being used in images of Cadillac engines. A camshaft regulates the opening and closing of an engine’s valves. As he sat in his office, next to some fishing trophy, he cradled two 20-inch-long camshafts on his thighs.
The first one, he pointed out, seemed rough. That is what he’d get from a supplier. The second one, which he had tooled, was smooth, its edges sharpened. The work presented a challenge because G.M. needs a spot in the end of the shaft to put a computer chip. But that section of the camshaft is normally grasped by his lathe, so Mr. Libera excogitate a special clamp so he could do the work.
Such are his daily puzzles. This has been lucrative work for him over the years, but this most recent occupation with G.M. appears to be his last, he has been told.
They can’t increase the cost of the autos so they have to choose it out of the parts.”
And, he added, it’s tough to compete with labor costs abroad that are much lower compared to the wages he pays. So he works even harder. Usually, his days have been 60 or 70 hours long, but have decreased to more regular hours using the recession.
Now, they could be the first in and the last out. The newest indignity of a changed world, he explained, came when G.M. said it was bringing back the Pontiac G.T.O., the first muscle car and an icon of American auto culture. It will likely be created in Australia.
This really is bad news for Mr. Libera. He hopes to reinvent his business with increased work coming from other industries, but nevertheless, it will be a tough road.
But it will not be what it was. We are half dead now.”
Pictures: You have to be somewhat creative.” Marcia Curtis for The New York Timespg.