As stated, their tooling was scrap level when they went under, At least that’s what I was told. SK was the same, according to former employees, when they went bankrupt and closed the Chicago plant.
Also, it’s irrelevant that at one time they (Armstrong) were producing tools for Craftsman. That deal ended, and I presume it’s because they weren’t cost competitive in a changing world.
You can’t rewrite history to suit your own nostalgic views of how the world should be.
Asheville is in a flood plane, as witnessed by the recent hurricane damage. Does that mean the whole area shouldn’t be rebuilt. I think you’ll get a lot of local pushback on that one. It is what it is., but zoning is the responsibility of local government, for the most part. I don’t fault Bain for that, even though I don’t really endorse venture capitalism in general as a concept that’s good for workers.
In the Nicholson example, the location of the new production facilities had nothing to do with a real or even perceived quality decline. It’s specs and tooling capability. If the specs and processes were changed and not properly validated, then shame on management, but it has nothing to do with the fact the building was in Mexico and the workers spoke Spanish, if that’s what you’re implying.
The tooling couldn’t have been complete ****, because Armstrong was literally making new wrench designs under both the Armstrong and Craftsman brand, that couldn’t have been made using older tooling.
This included both ratchet and wrench designs.
Maybe some of the gorging equipment was old, but rebuilding heavy forging equipment rather than replacing the equipment is standard.
In some cases, older equipment is sturdier than what is built and available nowadays.
Stanley also tried switching forming processes for wrench manufacture, and scrapped the process after spending $90million.
As for SK, they originally went bankrupt after a manager buyout, that happened right before Stanley bought Facom Tools.
The management likely knew that Stanley, or a similar company was going to purchase Facom, and Facom owned SK Tools, and would therefore not need the SK manufacturing facilities, since Stanley, and their main US competitor, Snap-On, both have their own US production facilities.
SK tried to make it on their own, but did so when Amazon was expanding into selling Tools.
Amazon bought SK tools in bulk, and sold the tools at lower costs than SK distributors were paying for tools when purchased in lower volumes.
This was followed buy a recession, that killed off a lot of customers and corporate tool purchases.
Basically, SK went bankrupt due to a few factors hitting them at once.
As for Nicholson files, in case you are unaware, the only process used for filemaking, that is highly standard to other tool manufacturing, is the forging of the file blanks, and maybe the grinding of the outside after forging.
The tooling used for cutting file teeth is highly specific, and is sometimes proprietary to the file manufacturer.
The tooling was supposedly shipped to Mexico, and was even being used, so any manufacturing issues, were likely on the Mexican factory not being instructed on the proper process, or the Mexican factory not understanding the process, and eliminating steps, therefore producing completely **** results.
There used to be dozens of file manufacturers in the USA, and there are detailed articles from 100 years ago on file manufacturing, so the proper steps to making high quality files are available, the steps just weren’t followed.
The exception might be the Nicholson Patternmaker rasps, since those were made on a special Nicholson machine, and the Mexican workers might not have been instructed on how to properly use the machine.
And no, I don’t think Mexicans are inherent idiots, but one or more people at the Mexican factory were.
