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The Rubics Cube of CRMC

M.B. Naegle

Diamond
Joined
Feb 7, 2011
Location
Conroe, TX USA
So here's the background. My dad's been in the leather industry his whole life but early on desided he liked working on the machinery more. Our Machine shop started when my dad aprenticed with a retired neighbor and bought his tools and machinery. He built up the shop over the years (Naegle's Industrial Leather Machinery) and in 1999, we bought the Campbell Bosworth Machinery Co. of Ft. Lauderdale FL. This company was founded in 1882 and hit it's peak in the 30's-40's era. From there it slowly went down till in 1999 it's owner was 'retired' with two employees. We started to patch things up and build the company back to where it needed to be till in 2006, we bought the Randall Leather Machinery corp. of Long Island, NY (which was in similar circumstances as CBMC, but founded in 1858) and formed Campbell Randall Machinery Co. Throughout this entire process we're had zero time to shut the shop down and devote time purely to organizing and setting up the shop. It's been a non-stop on-the-fly job filled with moving equipment in circles and constantly rethinking how we'll set everything up in our two downtown brick buildings (built roughly in the 1920's). Luckely things have been progressing! the shops producing and becomeing more efficient. So..... here's some pics. I'll post more as I take/find them.
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Our main building. Originally an Elks Lodge when new. Houses Service and Assembly, Machine shop, Offices, parts dept, show room and store front, and shipping.
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The 'annex' building. Been a radio station, bakery, and a bunch of other things. Houses our warehouse, woodshop, and random storage but will eventually hold our welding/fabrication shop and an extension shop to the Machining dept.

We're also temporarloy holding alot of inventory and machine shop equipment in a warehouse across town but hope to be able to consolidate it all under our own roof soon. The warehouse is kinda neat though. It's a large remaining shed from the railroad days and we've found some nifty artifacts there (tomato crates, locomotive parts, signal parts, 20's school books, ect.)

Now for the machines........ (note that some are repeats from previous threads but I'll try to keep them small)
 
The Breadwinners

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Hardinge Bridgeport VMC, and Southwestern Ind. Prototrak CNC lathe.

We also have a Bridgeport Torq-cut 22 VMC. No pics right now.
 
Horizontal Mills

All are non-operable right now however the B&S is getting set up for a job right now (cause it's the smallest/ easiest to temporaroly set-up)
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Induma "Supermill", Brown & Sharpe #12 production mill, Cincinnati 2L (also has a Vertical Tree mill head) This was the unit our shop started out with. Kearney & Trecker 2H
 
Vertical Mills

3 J-head's (one with a short bed)
1 Newstyle (variable speed) J-head not pictured
1 M-head (not set up right now)
1 Kondia vertical mill (temporaroly being used to mill tabletops)

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Lathes

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Southbend 10, Clausing 15-48, (2) Logan 800
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Delta (needs some work), Southbend 8 (turret, not set-up right now), And under that pile there's a ZPS-Tajmac R5 Turret lathe (needs LOTS of work).

Also not pictured is another Southbend 8 toolroom lathe and an MSC and Enco, both of which I hope will leave the facility before too long. In the mean-time they're getting us by till we can get the good stuff fixed up.
 
Interesting story, and cool buildings and machinery. Looks like yall got a nice collection of machines. You should add a big boy lathe to go along with the ones pictured....;)
 
Interesting story, and cool buildings and machinery. Looks like yall got a nice collection of machines. You should add a big boy lathe to go along with the ones pictured....;)
We're actually hoping to get ahold of a large swing Stubby someday. Something short but with a 18-24" swing. Mabey bigger. We'd use it for making flywheels and such.
 
We're actually hoping to get ahold of a large swing Stubby someday. Something short but with a 18-24" swing. Mabey bigger. We'd use it for making flywheels and such.

If you are looking for an 18-24" swing and about the same in travel you may want to look at a VTL (vertical turret lathe) it has the foot print of a mill and the table is horizontal with the tool coming down from the top. I would think it would be an ideal machin for turning flywheels and machining the shaft bores and such.
 
Surface Grinders

Harig Super 620, DoAll, Elliot 8-20
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DoAllSurfaceGrinder.jpg
Elliot8-20surfacegrinderfront.jpg

The Harig and Elliot are operational but all of them need some work. We're working on getting permanent coolant systums on each. The Elliot has some annoying hydrallic issues (notice the floor...) but is otherwise our best unit and has a temporary coolant setup (pvc pipe, 5 gal. bucket, mini-sub-pump:smoking:)
 
Thanks for the pics, very impressive, what type of parts do you make?
We manufacture and service machinery for the Leather industry (Heavy Duty sewing, cutting, forming, ect.) We make alot of our own equipment but with the economy we've been focusing more on pushing factory rebuilt units (we'll service anything related to the industry). Hopefully when things pick up more we can get back to manufacturing more of our own stuff. Most of it was designed between 1890-1940 so it's an adventure.:D
 
I like the horizontal mill idea:D. It would be a good use for our cincinnati as it's missing the overarm anyway. The main factor would be how standard we can make the tooling. We'll have alot of custom and repair work to do with the application but we'll also have to make a number of low quantity production batches too. We'll weigh the VTL/Horizontal mill options.
 
You would need to decide how to get the cutting edge up to centerline.

Most likely, decide on the "swing over the carriage/table", then make up the rest with a fixture that gives you tool holding. Most likely a weldment of some sort.

Then use the table to move the tooling.

Of course, if you could find a donor carriage, you could set up a proper crosslide, compound, etc.

Others should have suggestions, considerations, etc.

Good Luck
Steve
 
Scrapped Machines

(thought I had posted this but guess not)
In the chaos, we've parted ways with a couple units as well:

Rosa Drill Press - same caliber our Fosdick pictured above. Had a well designed geared head which had seen MUCH better days. Got scrapped.

Atlas lathe - terrible shape. Got left behind in New York when we bought and merged the Randall Company.

2 or 3 power hack saws - dunno make or vintage but they were in bad shape, we couldn't justify shipping them, and we were a little concerned over the safety hazard of the moving arms, so they got left behind with the Atlas lathe in New York.

2 or 3 small horizontal band saws - 2 cheap newer styles, one nice oldie. 2 died, one sold

Wong Fu Benchtop Mill - started wearing out (imagine that). Fell off the forklift as we were moving it outside. Scrapped.
 
Vertical Mill plans

This is just a consideration I'm having. Of the Vertical manual mills pictured (and the one bridgeport not pictured), I'm toying with the idea of putting CNC conversion kits into the J2J and the short bed J mill. I'm giving those consideration because the other two J heads and the Kondia have power feeds on the bed and the two J's have DRO's so I figure we'd just let them stay that way. Otherwise the JSJ and J shorty will get set up like all the others and we'll just invest in more VMC's as needed.

The Kondia will get a DRO and power drawbar eventually and mabey an enclosure if I can find one that isn't very restrictive (any idea's?) I'd like an enclosure because it has a nice in-base coolant system and they way we'd use it (flood style) would dump coolant everyware.

The M-head mill is going to stay a bare bones basic mill. It might get power feed on the table and a DRO, but no power drawbar. I'm trying to get the boss's to buy a shaper attachment to mount on it too. We've been doing all our keyway broaching on an arbor press and occasionaly in the VMC.

I doubt we'll ever need to buy another manual mill again unless one of our current one's dies, but we are going to invest in a wood router systum (probably cnc) to mill our tabletops with instead of the Kondia. It's incredibly better than how we used to do it buy hand with a plunge router but it still has it's limitations and the mill just isn't getting utilized as good as it should.
 
Forgot I had this thread going, but a lot has happened in 7 years!

As far as our company goes, business has gone very well. Each year's been better than the last and though we still have stressful days were it's hard to see why we're doing it, things keep getting better.

The whole experience has been very much like restoring an old machine tool. We've invested a lot more time and resources than we should, but the company as a whole ended up with a lot of resources and skills that we would have never had unless we drug them out of the mud of time and decay.

Our customer base and product line is incredibly diverse. We build and service a lot of antique technology, but it's what's needed. We also have a lot of new stuff coming in as demand and time line-up and it's fun to see how the new and old end up working together. I haven't posted specifics about what we do, but that will come.

For starters, we moved.... which I used to joke about never happening, because we had too mach cast iron weighing us down. But family needs and business needs have a way of making things happen. My brother and I have 6 kids between us, and we decided that small-town-Texas life didn't quite fill the needs of our families. On top of that, we had kinda hit a small town business ceiling that was governing more of our business decisions than we wanted. So, we started looking at options and decided that moving closer to a major city would fix both issues. We bought land in Conroe Texas, just north of Houston and had a building erected by October 2015. We started the long process of moving our operations over and were only completely shut down for about a week. After about a year, work at our Yoakum facility ceased and one of those buildings remains as a warehouse.

Our new building we designed for a year trying to find the best flow and use of space and ended up with a MUCH better layout than the old one (using Solidworks as an architectural platform was fun). It still ended up being 5000 sq.ft. smaller than our combined space in Yoakum though, so as of now we still have to keep some space there for warehouse space until things consolidate, scrap, or move into more construction here. We have a lot of slow moving inventory so it's worked out that I can make a "Yoakum Run" once a month to pick up things as needed.

Here's some pics of the construction/move/set-up
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