Variety In Engineering In Dudley | What happens when WPI grads run a machine shop
The story of Kokos Machine Co. in Dudley is a story about the American dream.
Rich Kokosinski started the company in 1980 with one machine in the basement of his Dudley home not far from South Main Street in Webster.
Kokosinski had come from Poland with nothing, learned some machining and within just a few years, started the basement shop and was supplying parts to Coherent General, a joint venture between laser maker Coherent Inc. and General Electric.
Today, Kokos remains in that house on Oxford Avenue, but it’s expanded to about 16,000 square feet and it’s run by Rich’s son Tom, a mechanical engineer and graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
“He intended this to be a one-man shop,” Chad Cohen, company vice president said when I visited recently. But as work for Coherent General grew, so did the shop. And as Tom Kokosinski became involved with the shop, it grew to be much more high-tech.
Getting Technical
It was Tom Kokosinski who introduced the laser cutting and electrical discharge machining (EDM) to Kokos. Now, the shop has four EDM machines, which use an electrically charged length of wire to make very high-precision cuts in various materials. Work that would take a week to accomplish on traditional machines can be done in 30 minutes on EDM equipment.
Kokos is also a traditional machine shop with all the equipment and capabilities that implies. So, the amount and variety of work it does is incredible.
“Apart from the financial industry, there is not an industry we have not made a part for,” said Charles McGrath, operations manager at Kokos. But, it turns out that the company has done work for the financial industry after all. Kokos has made components for digital shredders used to clear bank records.
The EDM and laser machining can be used for some pretty far-out stuff. (I saw a 1-inch-square piece of metal with 1,024 holes half the diameter of a human hair cut in it. The machine that did it is run by a mechanical engineer who attended WPI with Tom Kokosinski.)
Despite the complexity of the technology, you’ll find parts made by Kokos in some everyday objects, including Gillette razors. The piece of the razor that holds the lubrication strip to the blade is made by Kokos. Kokos parts can also be found in Bose audio equipment, television satellites and medical devices.
Cohen said the variety helps keep the company healthy. It has 32 employees and is in a position to hire as a new addition is completed.
Kokos also stresses the importance of planning, flexibility and doing just about anything for its customers.
The company works with anything from plastic to Beryllium and claims that 90 percent of the quotes it makes for work are converted to orders in an industry in which the average is more like 10-20 percent.
“If you need us to fire up on Sunday night, we’ll do it. If they need us to hand deliver to New York, we’ll do it,” Cohen said.
Being ready also allows the folks who work at Kokos to manage themselves. If a machinist wants to work at 6 a.m., that’s fine. If he wants to work from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m., that’s fine too. Each employee knows what work has to be done and when, and they’re trusted to get it done.
Got news for our Industrial Strength? E-mail WBJ Managing Editor Matthew L. Brown at mbrown@wbjournal.com
Click here to watch Rich Kokosinski talk about his company's history and capabilities:
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