Personal tool ownership and usage in US aircraft assembly?

I am involved in (/ suffering from) some QA related problems with aircraft production and assembly in the US. In going through the related paperwork shitstorm, one of the corrective actions mentioned is that they have now gotten rid of personally own tools and tool boxes, which were previously "comingled" with the company owned tools. This is a huge cultural difference from what I know from Germany, where no private tools are brought to work.

I am well aware that in the US even at officially licensed car dealerships people have their own privately owned tools. And I know this of course also from this forum for workshop/machine shop environments.

But in aircraft production? How do you do tool control, calibration, FOD control?

Is this normal business in the US or unheard of? Am I dealing with "rednecks"?
Can a mechanic at Boeing bring his favourite screwdriver from home?

BTW this company treats its employees badly and actually moved its facility to go non-union (did not work).
Value of the part produced is about $5 mil, which is about 7% of vehicle cost.

Martin

Been a LONG time, but when I hired on at General Dynamics - F-16 program, 1979, I was given a list of tools I had to buy and the size limits of the tool box I could buy and bring in. It was an USAF owned and supervised plant. GD supplied all air tools, riveters/etc and consumables like cuttting tools- , employee supplied all hand tools - wrenches/punches/hammers snips etc.

Got to remembering, the machinists had to buy their own basic measuring tools, which were calibrated by the company.

I am totally amazed ....
Thanks for that data point.

personal tools

Martin P said:

I am involved in (/ suffering from) some QA related problems with aircraft production and assembly in the US. In going through the related paperwork shitstorm, one of the corrective actions mentioned is that they have now gotten rid of personally own tools and tool boxes, which were previously "comingled" with the company owned tools. This is a huge cultural difference from what I know from Germany, where no private tools are brought to work.

I am well aware that in the US even at officially licensed car dealerships people have their own privately owned tools. And I know this of course also from this forum for workshop/machine shop environments.

But in aircraft production? How do you do tool control, calibration, FOD control?

Is this normal business in the US or unheard of? Am I dealing with "rednecks"?
Can a mechanic at Boeing bring his favourite screwdriver from home?

BTW this company treats its employees badly and actually moved its facility to go non-union (did not work).
Value of the part produced is about $5 mil, which is about 7% of vehicle cost.

Martin

Click to expand...

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for some companies when the try to 5S or make shop more neat and organized and smaller and more efficient they found senior machinist often had 2 to 6 big roll around tool boxes with a lot of accumulated tools and materials. by going to shared tools from a shared tool cabinet and tool crib they find a lot of shop floor space freed up.
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i have 7 tool boxes at home. company i work for now allows no personal roll around tool boxes. i have a clothes locker and a few personal tools are in there and calibrated yearly as all company tools are yearly calibrated. a caliper i had they said failed calibration my supervisor specifically sent email requiring me to confirm i brought it home and it was no longer being used at the company.
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i no longer spend maybe $200 a year on maintaining personal tools so in a way it is like getting a pay raise in that now the company supplies all needed tools and pays for their replacement as needed. each tool has a serial number so they do track each tool

I don't believe personal tools have any place in aircraft assembly.

The company would be miles ahead to just purchase what is needed.

One incident with a 25 pound, radioactive (so it would be easy to find if left in the airframe) bucking bar, stands out in my memory.

The pilots were complaining of a thump coming from the one wing, but it only happened under certain circumstances.

End result was an X-ray inspection of the whole wing, at the end of several weeks of other disassembly/reassembly, finds said bucking bar sealed into a blind bay in the wing structure. Supposedly, it was tracked back to being missing at the plant, much earlier.

When the aircraft banked to one side, then rapidly to the other, the bar thumped back and forth.

Solution was to drill a small hole, and essentially glue the bar in place, annotate the aircraft weight and balance to account for the weight, and seal the hole up.

I worked in a Tool Control environment for almost all my career. The concept of having to buy my own for work is a bit foreign to me, to be honest.


Cheers
Trev

As Rudd says, when I went to work at McDonnell Aircraft in 1954, they gave me a list of tools I was expected to have. There was some latitude in choices, but you needed a minimum set. Borrowing tools from coworkers was frowned on and only tolerated when you had a special need. An interesting byproduct was that everyone wanted to identify his tools but didn't want a mark that could readily be traced to him in case he left one in the plane. Things were a lot looser then. An errant bucking bar caused some mischief so they had a search of finished F3Hs and found 31. That was when they started making them slightly radioactive so they could go over a plane with a Geiger counter.

I have been out of that sort of employment for a long time, but a job shop I do a lot of work for as an outside contractor has a good range of company tools but everyone has his own and again, borrowing from another worker is only a sometime thing and not a regular practice. For example, I needed to tap several 1/4-20 holes in a machine I was working on and only had my portable tool box. I asked the owner for a tap wrench and he replied that he didn't have a company one and would not ask a machinist to loan his personal one. I managed with a cordless drill on that occasion, then added a tap wrench to my portable set. Since then I have gotten to know the machinists well enough that I can borrow a tool occasionally, but I keep that to a minimum. Fortunately my shop is only a few minutes drive away, so I can always go get them.

The above mostly refers to wrenches, screwdrivers, etc. Measuring equipment is company furnished and maintained, although many workers have some of their own.

Bill

Trev and I were typing at the same time, each with his bucking bar story. One found in the big search had a hole in it and would just fit between to structural members. Some one drove a rivet into the hole, locking the bar in place. Apparently he decided that drilling the rivet out was too much trouble so he left it there. I don't know how it got past inspectors.

My experience was over 25 years ago with authorized Boeing and MD repair stations.
The culture at both were for each mechanic to maintain their own tools. That could be a little as a small tool bag with a couple of screw drivers wrenches and a pencil, to those rolling carts that must weigh 1000 lbs empty. My choice was a smaller roll around (with big wheels to handle cracks in the tarmac) and a small tote box with the tool that were always needed when working inside the aircraft.

Purchasing tools and showing them to the others was part of that culture, just like machinists do.

A mechanic could "check out" most of the tools. any tool that needed calibration etc. that was expected. No "personal" torque wrenches. .But the checkout procedure was slow and cumbersome.

My box is filled and ready to go much the same as it would be if on the ramp . It's in the machine room. I use it's contents daily.

I realize the "repair station" environment differs from a manufacturing situation. I have no experience of working "on the line".

I may remember this wrong.....but....
Last year when I toured the Boeing assembly plant the tour guide told us that at every station of assembly there was complete control over inventory of nuts, bolts etc. I have to imagine that would include screwdrivers and other tools. He said every item needed to be accounted for before the plane could be sent to the next stage of assembly to avoid someone leaving a screwdriver where it doesnt belong. I assume....it also tracks that 24 rivets were used instead of 22. I dont see how this could work with personal tools being used. Maybe I mis understood .....or maybe in other parts of the plant things are different????

There are many problems with banning personal tools. One is that the workers usually know a lot better than some engineer what tools are actually needed. For example, if you have some dork engineer write down the steps to make something he might have 25 items on the list. If you then videotape someone actually making the part and write down each step the worker does on the videotape, maybe it has 120 steps and 10 different tools the engineer did not mention.

Another problem with using company tools is that people will treat stuff they don't own like shit. Oh, hey, I just dropped that $500 gauge block. So what, just throw it back in the box. They will also steal stuff. This is actually the main reason employees had to bring their own stuff; if you provided small tools they would all be stolen. Because of this the floor would never have the tools needed. Half the stuff is missing/useless because it is either destroyed or stolen. Oh, sorry, we have to shut down the line for a whole freakin day because some needed wrench is missing.

Just got off the phone with two buddies of mine. One is a retired airline mechanic who said he was expected to bring his own basic tools. The other is currently working for an aircraft manufacturer and has worked for several. He said the only place he wasn't required to bring his own basic tools was when he was in the Air Force. Sometimes the company provided calibrated measuring tools and at other places his CMTs were just added into the company's certification schedule.

Sounds like it's still normal practice in the USA.

Steve

To further what JSCPM wrote, I apprenticed under a couple of old heads, been there since WWII. They had lots of small tools they had modified over the years for particular tasks - bent wrenches, a ratchet with a hole drilled though the center so you could put a hex wrench through it and tighten hi-loks faster, etc. None of that was company tooling, or even available from a supplier as far as I know, but it made the work go much faster. One of them told me they had to get the machinists downstairs to drill the hole through the ratchet since it was hardened.
We were also encouraged to come up with production aids on our own - simple locating jigs, etc. The company would pay you for those if they worked out.

Fwiw.. In the Finnish air force it would have been iconceivable to have personal anything.
I worked on Mig21bis one year as an assistant mechanic after their tecchnical school.

In europe, generally, its illegal for companies to ask anyone to bring their own tools.
All company supply all materials and required tools, by law.

Stealing is not a problem, generally.
If it was, you would get rid of those workers.

Later, here in Spain, my more experienced millwrights had their own toolboxes as extras.
We supplied everything, and if they wanted to use or have anything else it was fine by me.
We employed 4 techs, all were engineers.
Neither tool loss or breakage was a problem, ever.

Here is an article from 2006, which has Boeing supplying all tools.
Boeing Frontiers Online

My guess is that Boeing and Airbus, in the US, supply all tools.
And that smaller companies still allow personal tools.

On the Boeing line, they do the same thing over and over again- they know what is going to be required.
Its nothing like a repair shop.

It's such a scam in the USA that machinists and others are required to buy their own tools. I hate that I wasted my own money buying tools to make other peoples parts. "Oh but the pride of tool ownership! And you can take them with you when you leave!" No, you should provide me the tools I need to make your parts, period.

I used to chat with our local cabinet rep (a large, formerly Swiss, company who's product is mostly blue and green) quite a bit and he was saying five years ago they were doing more and more big cabinet installs in car dealers because the dealers were going towards supplied tools more and more. But this was because the cars are getting more and more specialized so having your own wrenches and such wasn't so important when it was all weird eurofasteners. This is an anecdote and I don't know if it's actually a trend. For my part I think anywhere you expect people to bring their own tools for loss/damage reasons is evidence of an unfortunate level lack of technical and more importantly, cultural training.

When I was a young co-op student it was all about knowing who you could and who you couldn't bum cigarettes off. I quit smoking before graduating and our shop buys all the tools.

Martin P said:

. . . BTW this company treats its employees badly and actually moved its facility to go non-union (did not work). . . Martin

Click to expand...

Wouldn't be surprised if it was company management that's at the root of your quality problems; rather than personally owned tools.

Having moved its facility (twice?), they've probably shaken out 70% of the folks who actually knew how to do a quality job. Sounds like they're now in the process of pissing off the 30% or so that might remain??

I dropped a compagnie wrench ones in a extremly difficult place
I just left it there
Would it have been my own I would have spend €300 on compagnie time to get my €50 wrench back (it was a big one)

My personal tools I would nurish more as compagny tools (on compagny time ) Also have to keep them apart from tools of colleges Lets say 10min every day Thats 50min a week and thats a total of about 40 hr a year
Thats a whole week
Personal tools cost a compagny money IMHO

Peter from Holland

I am not lawyer but I wonder about liability and employee taxes. Seems to me if the employee has to provide tools at some point they become a sub-contractor not a paid employee. Of course many companies no longer provide health insurance the employees have to buy it for themselves.
Bill D.

I have seen both extremes, I have been in shops that required you to supply all of your own tools including consumables such as endmills and drills, and I have been is shops where they supplied everything you could possibly need. In the end, neither worked.

The shop where I was given a full sized roll around full of tools, I ended up bringing in my own tool box with my own tools anyways, because they were more comfortable, better functioning, and in a lot of instances better quality. Never mind that that roll around box full of tools was somewhere around $40,000, they were not tools I would have bought and I did not like to use. I pay $100 for the Snap-on ratcheting screwdriver handle because it does work that much better, and it does last that much longer under daily use as a mechanic. And when it breaks, they come out and give me a new one. I'm sure the off brand square handle driver the company bean counter picked out is nice looking, but it's not comfortable to use, and it slows me down. My tools are better, because they are mine. I spent 20 years figuring out which tools work the best for me, and no office jockey is going to tell me that the tools the other guy is using will work just as well. Also, because I was not the first owner of this company tool box, there were a number of important tools missing or broken, and most everything useful was worn and abused. I spent the first week cleaning the damn thing. In the three months I put up with the place, I never did get replacements for most of the missing tools.

Now at the other end of the spectrum, the machine shop where they supplied nothing, was just stupid. Drill bits are consumables, and you have to elect to replace them occasionally, as are endmills. Now the older machinists had it figured out, they would stock up on cheap endmills from flea markets and fleabay and hand them off every couple of months when the company offered resharpening, and just filled their drawers with resharpened or replaced cutters. But for myself, as I was technically a 'mechanical assembler' and was only working in the machine shop part time, trying to build up a third set of tools on my pathetic pay scale was impractical. At least I was able to find some decent used measuring equipment, that the company had calibrated.

My grandfather was a German engineer and machinist, as was his father, and so was the first machinist I trained under. They all took great pride in their tools, that they had made themselves. If you came along and told any one of them that they had to use company tools, I'm sure they would tell you in no uncertain terms and in great and lengthy detail just what and in which orifice you could shove it.