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April 13, 2009 INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH

Some Very Small Parts In Webster

H.T. Machine Co. in Webster is a little hard to find, despite being near the entrance to a large industrial park on Town Forest Road.

When I pulled up to H.T.’s address, the only sign I saw was for a cheerleading school. But on the other side of an unmarked door under a fire escape was H.T. Machine and its general manager Steve Leighton, who was kind enough to show me around.

Basement Commute

H.T. is interesting for a couple of reasons. One, it was started by Howard Tryba (that’s H.T.) in his basement after he got sick of riding a company shuttle from Webster to Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, Conn. every day.

As Leighton, Tryba’s son-in-law, explains it, Tryba’s basement shop started out by doing repair work and “small, oddball jobs that other people didn’t want to do.”

Tryba’s first expansion came when he hired two employees and moved the shop into his garage. From there, he moved the shop to far less than ideal mill space in downtown Webster and in 2001 to the modern industrial building at 15 Town Forest Rd.

Today, the company has 24 employees and in a way, still specializes in small oddball jobs that other shops won’t do.

H.T. is what’s known as a “job shop,” meaning everything it makes is made according to the design and specifications of others.

The shop’s niche is in what Leighton called “ones and twos,” very small orders for specific parts. And Leighton has more than a few stories about working his staff all night to fit tight, emergency deadlines. Its main customers are medical equipment manufacturers and industrial manufacturers in the wire and cable and steel rolling industry.

“A steel plant loses $1 million a day if it’s down,” Leighton said.

Many of the jobs that require H.T. to make only one or two parts may be from a company that needs the parts to do a repair. H.T. does a lot of repair work for Morgan Construction, the steel rolling mill giant based in Worcester.

In recent years, H.T. has also moved into contract assembly work. Its entry into that market came when a customer asked if H.T. wanted to bid on an assembly job and H.T. said that not only could it do the assembly, but it could make all the parts to be assembled, as well.

Leighton said many machine shops focus on volume and can produce millions upon millions of parts for a few cents each. H.T. is at the other end of the spectrum, making a few specialized, expensive parts and offering capabilities, like bending and painting, that many other shops do not.

“We’re not set up to do thousands of anything,” Leighton said. “A lot of places don’t want to touch the ones and twos, and if they do, they send it to me.”

Got news for our Industrial Strength column? E-mail Managing Editor Matthew L. Brown at mbrown@wbjournal.com.

Watch as H.T. Machine General Manager Steve Leighton describes what the company does.

 

Watch as Leighton explains why demand for his company's product has increased.

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