Not Your Father's Shop In Oxford | Family Takes T&D Specialties from old-school to tech school
Paul Sirard, president of T&D Specialties Inc. in Oxford, wants high-school students to know that being a machinist is not the grimy, low-paid trade it was a generation or two ago.
That’s because T&D — which was started by his father, Richard Sirard, in 1972 — would expand if only he could find skilled help. To that end, Sirard works closely with Bay Path Regional Technical School in Charlton to encourage students to at least consider machining, but it’s a tough sell.
“It still has that stigma that it’s old and dirty and that it doesn’t pay anything. But there’s a big difference between a modern machinist and a machine operator,” Sirard said.
He ought to know. When he and his brother Steve bought the company from their father in the mid-1990s, it was still an old-fashioned tool and die shop with one or two CNC machines. Today, T&D is a state-of-the-art precision machining shop with customers in the military, medical device, optics, aerospace and electronic industries.
The transition was made in part because Sirard himself was graduating from Bay Path and beginning his career as a machinist. At that time, the industry began changing from the back-breaking, thankless, oil-soaked trade it once was into the high-tech, engineering-intensive occupation it is today.
The New Machinist
The last straw for Sirard was watching as his brother ran the shop’s lathes in two 24-hour shifts just trying to get parts out on time.
“I said, ‘This is enough,’” Paul remembered, and began buying high-end CNC machines that could accomplish complex, high-precision tasks with speed and efficiency.
Today, the shop’s variety of machines are controlled by a central computer program that can handle all the work in the entire shop, rather than each machine requiring its own programming.
And T&D will machine just about anything.
So, with one independent sales rep, the company’s work finds its way into arthroscopic surgery tools, night-vision equipment, electronic components on military planes and other applications where precision really matters.
Some of the pieces being machined during my visit were incredibly complex, yet can be made by one machine.
The company’s high-tech specialization couldn’t have been completely unexpected. Paul showed me a small, narrow, jointed piece of metal. Turns out it was a piece made by his father that was used in gloves worn by astronauts.
Plus, the place is clean, just like Sirard said. Now I’ve been to machine shops that are not clean, but most that I’ve visited are, and I think Paul is right when he makes the argument that the trade isn’t what it used to be, especially in his father’s day, when nearly everything was still done by hand.
Still, the skills learned in those days are valuable today. Sirard, in his interaction with Bay Path, tries to get interested students to understand what it was like to do things by hand. That feel for the job, for how the material responds to being worked at different speeds and in different conditions, helps make better high-tech machinists today.
Students don’t have to worry about wearing dark blue coveralls and getting covered in grease and metal shavings, though. Now, being a machinist is very much dependent on programming knowledge and organization, even if knowledge of the old-school skills is a must.
Tech school students today can find themselves in a career that challenges them, allows them to grow and prosper and gives them the opportunity to make cool stuff. I hope the folks at T&D can convince more of them to realize that.
Got news for our Industrial Strength? E-mail WBJ Managing Editor Matthew L. Brown at mbrown@wbjournal.com.
Learn more about T&D from Paul Sirard in this exclusive WBJournal.com video clip:
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