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Briefly, I had a co-op job through high school as a machinist at W.F. Wells and Sons, where we made some really nice metal-cutting band saws. Those were good days. Then I got onto a tool and die apprenticeship and stepped into moldmaking. Worked at a buncha the higher-end (if I may say so) shops in the area, and kinda morphed into a mold designer. Took the summer off in 91 and worked full time in my shop at home, doing some guns and some molds. Got an offer I couldn't refuse to work as an engineer, and poof, I was reborn as white-collar. Worked in these positions, title usually something like program manager / project engineer / enginerring supervisor, through to 2000, when I finally gave in to a burning desire to do guns full time and to say bye-bye to building molds and molding parts for unreasonable, unscrupulous, uninterested and non-paying automotive customers. No sour grapes about the plastics biz as a whole, I enjoyed that career very much, but automotive was starting to displace cameras, computers, and defense work as our meat and potatoes work. The car companies typically acted as if their main goal was not getting good quality parts on time at a fair price, it was putting us out of business whatever the cost. Apologies to anyone working for the Big Three; I met puh-lenty of fine people there, but as it happened, many of them were bound by their own system to use slash and burn business practices, others plum enjoyed it.
How fine it is these days to know that ALL my customers are polite and professional, stand-up people...... not like it's a big surprise, we as gun people tend to operate with values from the good ol' days, I think.
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