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household products. I didn’t have a chance to build it into a viable income before I reenlisted and went to Germany
While in Germany
Here is a list of the courses I assisted in.
Automotive charging systems 1&2
Power steering systems
Automatic transmissions 1and 2
Clutch and manual transmissions
Chassis straightening 1 and 2
Auto body 1 2 and 3
Engine diagnostics and tuning 1 2 and 3
Automotive electrical main and sub systems 1and 2
Painting and trim repair 1 through 4
Upholstery and glass repair 1 and 2
Brakes and alignment 1 and 2
Practical welding 1 and 2
With my background in mechanics both as I was growing up and the military schools, many times I conducted the lab studies while the professor held class room counsel sessions.
Some of the projects included the cutting of 2 cars in half then welding them back together connecting the rear of one with the front of the other then making the repairs look as if neither car had been touched, and afterwards having them inspected by the German (Fahrzeug-Hauptuntersuchung, common “TUV”) to see if they could locate any repairs that had been performed. Another was to disassemble a car down to the last nut and bolt then catalog and label every part with the manufactures part numbers then over the next several courses of study have the students reassemble the parts into major components then into a fully restored auto, then have it inspected by the TUV. In 1976 a 10 year old vehicle had to pass 1200 inspection points to be registered with German tags
Another project of mine that we turned into a lab study course was I built up a 383cubic inch Dodge engine for my pickup. We polished every interior surface I bought many high performance racing parts then proceeded to make sure they were balanced in every way and polished for the proper clearances to be used in a high performance street vehicle. I used all of the best parts available from Chrysler direct connection at that time. When the engine was finished it tested out to just less than 600 hp running on a carburetor with out a turbo. I put the engine and the 4 speed close ratio transmission in my 3 year old dodge pickup. Also on that truck I designed and built an onboard CTIS {central tire inflation system} I installed a Warren
On some of my TDY assignments while in Germany
Advanced ranger training @ Ft Campbell KY
Parachute Jump school @ Ft Benning GA
Helicopter Gunner school @ Ft Rucker AL
Combat diving school @ Key West Fl
Geographical logistics school @ Grafenwere Germany
Structural demolitions school @ Grafenwere Germany
Tactical nuclear ballistic systems control leadership course Hoenfelds Germany
Field communications repair Hoenfields Germany
Total times TDY while in Germany 23, total times outside of Germany
My longest time on TDY while stationed in Germany
During my weekends I went on VOLKS MARCHES
I left the Army in 1977 and went to work at a company that built oilfield geological surveying and logging equipment. The company was Energy Products Inc, Where I worked sometimes as many as 120 hours per week in 5 months I had received 10 raises in salary and was earning more than the plant foreman. I attended the Womack Hydraulics design and service school at night for while. after that I was design-building hydraulic crane booms and winches as well as the control consoles, it was also one of my duties to train the new personnel as they were hired, and to instruct the customers in the operations of the equipment. I left that company in early 1978 due to the long hours I was working was having a very negative effect on my family.
I then went to work at Watson Foundation drilling Inc. That was involved in manufacturing drilling equipment, where I was the senior fabrication and mechanical design specialist. While working there I reworked most of their fabrication jigs and fixtures to improve the processes of welding fabrication. In addition I helped in the redesign of all of their products. I worked there for a little over a year then a friend asked me if I would run his marine construction company designing and building marinas and private boat houses. We built dozens of stationary as well as floating boat storage units. Many had hoists to lift the boats out of the water. In addition we built several retaining walls to counter act the erosion of coil into the lake.
In late 1979 he asked me if I would consider building an oilfield drill rig derrick for a man he knew. Since it was the beginning of winter it was becoming too cold for working around the water, I thought why not.
I hired a couple of guys and we built the derrick while doing this I convinced the man to tell his customer that he should allow us to build a complete rig, using as many components from his old rig as possible he thought that was a good idea. So George Bankie the owner of the shop made arrangements through the Boswell High school to send as many as 20 students over for on the job training and extra credits. I taught them how to weld how to do layout work and blueprint reading, the proper way to use shop equipment how to read machine shop measuring instruments, and so many more practical every day shop procedures. We could only allow them to work a maximum of 30 hours per week as per Texas
One of the young men latter went on to owning his own mobile welding shop, over the years I hired him many times to take care of some of my customers when I was unable to do so His work quality was every bit as good as what I would do.
I personally designed the entire rig. Specs are as follows
Derrick: 72 ft tubular square tested load 400,000 lbs
Draw works: double drum, primary drum 16 in core diameter Lebus grooved for 1 1/8 inch wire rope, floating main shaft 24 inch Fawick air clutch, brakes 330deg wrap 9x42” drum air actuated release positive spring lock. Non water cooled.
Secondary drum 16” core Lebus grooved 1 1/8 inch wire rope, floating main shaft 28 inch Fawick air clutch, brakes 330 deg wrap 10 x48 drum air actuated release positive spring lock Water spray cooling.
Chain driven, 2 speeds/ 5 speed main transmission
Engine/s 2 Ford industrial 460 cu inch propane fueled connected to a pair of C6 automatic transmissions that I modified to manually up and down shift only. These were connected to a chain type compounding unit could be operated on either or both engines
The compound unit (my design) powered the main transmission of the draw works and the rotary drilling table.
Rotary table, Hacker machine 15inch
The trailer / substructure I built from a used military tank retriever trailer modified on the rear to be the drilling platform
The entire drilling rig could be operated by a crew of 4
The derrick had a shifting crown that when deployed in one direction the Kelly and swivel would be positioned over the hole in the opposite shift the Traveling blocks with the bails and elevators were over the hole for raising or lowering the drill string and either adding or removing the drill stem.
The make up and break out tongs were hydraulically operated by cylinders mounted in the derrick.
The derrick was hydraulically raised as well.
The Mud pump and its related articles we mounted on its own trailer
The trailer that transported the dog house (Control Shack) and fuel supply was a converted 48 ft Dry van.
The drill string and collars were transported in a rolling pipe box
In total there were 4 trailers every thing could be set up in less than 3 hours and be ready to drill.
The second rig was much the same except we used a Cat diesel 375 hp engine and an Allison 7 speed transmission and mounted every thing lower in the trailer. Giving a totally flat working floor from front to rear even the draw works was mounted below deck
During the construction of the drill rig the customer asked me if I could possibly build him an annular blow out preventer, He furnished me with the rubber internal bladder as it is called. I took all of the diminutions and designed a unit based on machined steel and thick pipe or tubing I provided a local machine shop with the drawings for the parts required than welded them into an assembly, after testing it was found that my design was not only less expensive to build but yielded a 15% higher closing strength the results of this started at least 3 companies to copy and manufacture my unit. Under the names of TEXAS B.O.P. / DIAMOND BLOW OUT PREVENTERS / and mine just called Frank’s BOP. In the next 3 years close to 300 B.O.P.s were made.
In the fall of 1980 I bought my first portable welding machine and rigged up as a contract welder in the spring of 1981 I went out on my own my first contract was with a company named Sunbelt Drilling and productions I was hired as a welder and as a consulting design engineer and later when the company sold to the Walter Kidde corporation I helped work on and do some designing on the largest (at that time) land based drilling ring in the world. During the winter of 1981 I built a few more of the annular blow out preventers that I had designed.
In March of 1982 the Ft. Worth Boat Club contracted me to design and build a barge and pile driver and build an extension to their marina the unit I built had a 40 ft mast and a 1700 lb drop hammer I hired 2 guys and we built a 400 ft extension with a break water and 10 ft wide walkway, driving over 200 steel pilings more than 20 ft into the lake in 30 to 40 ft of water. Since the slip frames were required to be bolted together from under water I built a breathable air compressor to keep from continuously having to have my dive tanks refilled. During the course of building the marina I spent over 300 hours under water and I certified 3 divers for shore and shallow (up to 40’) diving.
After this I built several personal piers and boat storage facilities, many of these I built lifts in them to raise the boats out of the water.
In late 1983 a friend of mine asked me if I would consider going partners with him and another man to start a dock building company on a newly completed lake. Since the water level had not reached its stable level we bought an older truck mounted crane I designed and built a pile driver to be suspended from the boom with an operators station on it I made a 1000 lb drop hammer that was shot filled making it a dead blow this increased the amount of available kinetic energy transferred into each hammer strike by 45% it was powered by a 14 hp engine, I built the winch with a quick release clutch and a catch brake to stop the drum after the hammer strike. The first time we used it we drove 30 pipe pilings to a depth of 14 feet in one day. I then designed and built another barge with a derrick and hammer set up, this one had a 250 hp V8 engine and a 2500 lb shot filled hammer I designed a hydraulic clutch and brake set up that was air operated and a guide system that allowed us to set up to 5 pilings without having to continuously re square and measure, this also served as a long floating walkway for constructing the docks, the barge also had retractable axles under it to allow transport from one lake to another with ease. We could move onto a lake and be in operation very quickly. I also made several piling clamps that acted as quick scaffolding supports. With our equipment that I had built we could construct an average sized boat house and dock in just under 4 to 5 days. I then built a machine to coat Styrofoam blocks with polyurethane to protect them from becoming water logged and prevent fish and animals from destroying the floatation for the floating boat storage and marinas that we built. During this time I did design consulting for a company that manufactured oilfield related equipment and automotive lifts. By mid 1984 I was spending so much time working my welding and repair business and helping design lifts that the dock building portion of my business was suffering so I sold out to my partners to this day I have not collected all of my selling price as the company started a down ward spiral in sales shortly after I sold out. While doing work with the Gooch Research and Development Corporation I learned a lot about automotive lifts from some of the other engineers and designers and got involved in the development of a new line of products called Car Stackers. I had my other customers to consider as well so only just worked there a few hours a week. One of my other customers was Arthur Equipment where I worked as a contract fabricator and welder on caterpillar equipment, rebuilding all types and models of Cat. Equipment and the various earth moving equipment that goes with them. I repaired them back to factory condition and sometimes better than factory condition. I also did many modifications to them. I worked there most of the time for about 5 years. While there I would disassemble a dozer or scraper or loader or excavator and other machines sometimes all the way down to the bare frames then repair any thing that needed doing and reassemble them I would design an make many special tools to help my job to become easier, like a portable boring machine to bore out the bearing and shaft locations after I had welded them up. I converted 992C loaders into huge forklifts for military applications, I designed a machine to remove rocks from fields for agriculture that would till the earth 30 inches deep remove all stones larger than 1 ½ inches level the soil inject nutrients and convey the rocks to a haul off support vehicle. I have taken D11 Dozer “U” type blades and remanufactured them into a straight type design using all of the original parts to accept factory replacement cutting edges. While working for Arthur Equipment I sometimes drove a truck in his transportation division. Since I held the proper driving license for this I sometimes would drive a tractor trailer rig that had as many as 18 axles and could haul 200 to 300 thousand pounds. I also had several short term contracts on pipe line jobs at refineries, and cryogenic chemical plants, as well as oil, natural gas and water distribution and delivery lines up to 96 inches in diameter. And I worked on what is called shut downs at some factories like TXI cement plant and at Chaparral Steel mill, sometimes these shutdowns would require me to work 7 days a week at 18 hours per day for up to 2 to 3 months. I worked on the structure of several of the water parks and theme parks in the area, sometimes I would be required to operate many different types of heavy equipment or mechanical and hydraulic cranes up to 200 tons with 200 foot long booms at places like Wet and Wild, Six Flags over Texas
In 1988 Bill Gooch the man who used to own GRAND (Gooch research and Development) Called me to offer me a position with his company. I had recently suffered a back injury while I Had been able to return to work going almost everything that I had been doing I felt that I was in need of a change. He offered me 10% of the company any vehicle/s I needed world travel and a senior position the plant and installations manager,
Along with a decent monthly salary if I would come on board this was on a Saturday on Monday I learned that Mr. Arthur was going to sell his business of 15 years, he told me that the buyer had asked that I stay on and become a regular employee of the firm but no prospect of much more than that. This made up my mind for me I knew I was walking away from double of what I was going to take as a salary at Car-Stackers; however the prospect of the other benefits outweighed the upfront money.
The company had been formally in business for a couple of years they had approximately 200 of their car parking machines installed around the country, and were in a constant state of updating and design changes. They held several patents on their design that were supposedly very strong in nature, leaving few known options that could have been economically circumvented. One of the first things I did was design a set of welding fixtures for production basis. In so doing I suggested several enhancements to the designs. Then on the weekends I started completely redesigning the double parking lift to accept a wider range of applications first I designed the columns and power rail so that the power rail could be installed in either direction and on either side and to have a multiple lock setting for different rise heights. Also different heights of columns could be used while still using the same length of cables or chains to lift with allowing for installations in reduced height areas. Next I changed up the platforms and standardized them to match the triple parking machine, reducing the required amount of inventory needed by half. I also designed an adjustable lifting attachment this made the machines more versatile to suit the customers’ needs and again reduced or required inventory. At the same time it speeded up our manufacturing process, and reduced the amount of weld fixtures needed this in turn yielded a 3 5% savings on required floor space. It had only taken me less than one month to make all of these changes working both Saturdays and Sundays, our plant was very large and had several areas that were not being used so keeping everything under wraps like in a skunk works posed no problems, finally one Sunday I installed the machine in our back parking lot, on Monday I demonstrated it Bill Gooch took one look at it and said that he couldn’t believe that I had completely redesigned his invention all without infringing on the patents and creating another 20 points that could be applied for. I told him of what I had been planning in my redesign to reduce inventory load, standardize our product line make a machine that had more capabilities, reduce the manufacturing time save floor space in the plant and reduce the overall cost of our machines without compromising on quality or reliability, and at the same time reduce shipping costs But the most important thing was to have a more user friendly, better looking unit. We then started redesigning our triple to use many of the same parts as the double. This was in Nov of 1988, over the next couple of years we did many design changes to the triple stackers but my initial redesign of the double was hardly changes at all only some very minor cosmetic changes were made, with the exceptions of building a heavy duty unit that had a much higher capacity.
I went to Australia
When I returned to Texas
In1991 I went to Kuwait as an observer shortly after the liberation for a couple weeks, I went to Israel
I rented the building next to our factory for some side jobs that way I could do some other design work without it interfering in our parking machine manufacture. One of my prior customers needed a hydraulically raised turn table for his heavy haul trailer so he could make his trailer into a modular unit and haul other specialty items like very long vessels having a turntable in front and one mounted to the rear 6 axle group allowed him to remove the bed of the trailer and use it as a dolly setup this saved him about 25,000 lbs without the bed. The tower and turn table weighed 4,000 lbs and would raise 20 inches with a 200 ton cap., and could be raised or lowered while driving.
In 1992 I did much of the same hauling installing redesigning and I went to Argentina and Hawaii for installs of our parking machines. In late 1992 we sold our company to a corporation that had manufacturing in South-Africa also in 1992 I opened up my machine/fabrication shop. As a clause in the sale of car-stackers International Inc I retained the rights of manufacture and repairs for all of our existing customers. I also kept much of the fabricated and machined stock and all of the fabrication and machining fixtures. I did not retain any drawings or copies of records of sales. Except for the ones that had purchased service agreements with me, I also leased all of the equipment from the principle owner since it was not part of the sale, this equipment together with the equipment that I owned allowed me to have a functional operating factory. With the inventories or raw materials left over from the sale of the company and the equipment I started trying to build up a customer base for custom freight lifts as that would not constitute an infringement of the sale agreement, the corporation that bought the car-stacker line contacted me as well to fabricate much of the critical parts, because of their arrogance at the time of the sale they thought they did not need to hire me to relocate to South Africa to run their factory.
They also learned the hard way that they needed the fixtures that now belonged to me. I spent half of 1993 making fixtures for them to metric specifications and sending them to South Africa, also in 1993 I started doing a lot of hydraulic cylinder repairs and machining for a Friend of mine who had a Hydraulic repair center.
I started getting a good customer base in the heavy haul trucking industry, building trailer parts and doing repairs modifying the trucks to pull the removable goose neck trailers, mounting extra axles under trucks redesigning the suspensions systems on them adding winches and auxiliary transmissions. I had men that I didn’t even know show up at my shop late at night after hearing about me and driving sometimes 2000 miles just to have their repairs done or send me a brand new truck from as far away as Portland Maine
In 1995 I went to Missouri Kuwait
About the middle of 1995 the city started road construction in front of my shop and none of my heavy haul customers could get their trucks into my shop so they were forced to go else where regular trucks and trailers could deliver and pickup from me but my business suffered greatly with a loss of over 60% of my customers, and 75% of my business. They finally finished in late 1996, but the damage to my business was horrific.
My local customer base was slowly returning in1997. The man who owned the concrete cutter contacted me and asked me to see if I could come up with something to break out a chimney from a 45 story building. He had taken over the contract from another company that had spent 3 weeks trying to break it out but had only removed the top 20 feet of brick work and about 6 feet from the top. The contract called for him to be finished with the complete removal in less than 30 days from the date of his starting but he had been awarded a 15 day grace period to start as they had discovered some asbestos that had to be removed. I went with him to take a look at what he needed and to make my recommendations. The chimney was about 4 feet inside diameter at the top and 6 ½ feet at the bottom; it was 10 inches thick at the top and 18 inches thick at the bottom. It had a double row of 1 inch rebar on4 inch centers and was wrapped with a double row or 5/8 inch rebars every 8 inches, and was still over 535 feet tall going right up through the center of the building so any form of blasting was impossible and jack hammering had proved useless. I explained to Larry how I planed to design a machine to use the chimney’s strength against its self by building a set up that would operate similar to the jaws of life only on a much bigger scale to push outward from inside and be lowered and rotated as needed. What I came up with I called the Arms of destruction to briefly explain what it looked like think of a pair of steel arms slightly rounded each being 1 feet long 2 ½ inch thick beveled to less than ½ inch along the outside edge joined at the top with a double link for lifting and about 1/3 of the way down pivoting on a turnbuckle having a 4 inch diameter thread, and a 8 inch hydraulic cylinder held in the lower portion to push outwards. The 5000 psi cylinder pushing on the arms caused the outer curved beveled surface to crumble the concrete the stiffness of the rebar caused an explosive action when pressure was applied. It took about 12 days co build then by the time the all clear was given by the environmental inspector we had every thing in place to start. The first day we removed 4 floors worth of the chimney, allowing the rubble to fall to the bottom and out a Shute to be removed. It was the general contractor’s responsibility to remove the rubble. After 12 hours he stopped us from breaking any more until he could get things cleaned up as his 3 skid steer loaders couldn’t keep up.10 days later we completed the break out of the chimney. And ahead of the original time table that had been set prior to the finding asbestos in the ceilings. After that the contractor called on me a few times to design things for them but I mostly refused to do any designs because they did not pay my customer like they should have. He had to take them to court over his money due him on some other projects. Larry had paid me up front and gave me a nice bonus for helping him. Another project in early 1993 was for one of my heavy haul customers, Estivan Molnar. He wanted to make his 3+3+3+4axle tractor trailer rig rear steer able I had already made the hydraulic tower for him so now he needed to be able to steer the back 6 axles I built 4 cylinders and mounted them on the group for and aft of the pivot then made a clip on walkway and seat for the rear bumper of the trailer when required to either raise the load or steer around a fight corner someone would ride on the back. Later on a new truck I designed a coaxial steering system that had a small steering wheel in the center of the trucks steering wheel and an auxiliary steering set up that could either be used by the passenger or taken out side for ground observance while steering, but this wasn’t until 1998. Also for him I designed and built a turn table that raised by air it had 24 inches of rise and was 12 inches tall when lowered, and could lift 150,000 lbs.
1997 thorough 1998 I made a few car stackers and a few ramps for the trucks then I made a hydraulic tubing bender and we built an order of stocking carts, the customer and I settled on a per piece price that should have netted both of us a small profit, however from the time we made the contract till the time we were able to start purchasing the materials many of the prices had close to doubled. Steel prices had gone up by 30% the hardware had gone up by 70%. By the time we had completed the order both of us had maxed out all of our credit cards and had to sell several items just to try and meet payroll. Looking back on it now, we would have been better off paying the revocation of contract clause at the beginning when the first delay of funds transfer was encountered. The revocation clause was 30% of the total order but that would have been thousands of dollars less than the loss we suffered. We rebuilt a rotary jet bead blasting machine for another company that turned into a loss due to the customer not honoring the final payment for the additional work performed, again a loss of several thousand dollars. In July of 1998 my landlord asked me to sub lease some space at the rear of my building to a guy that did soil stabilizing. So I built several injection machines to mount on caterpillar loaders. These machines each had 10 hollow rods 12 feet long that were pushed into the ground then a mixture of chemicals was injected to harden up and stabilize the soil to reduce cold wet or dry weather heaving and cracking
He wanted to store some wet and dry chemicals on my property. I had no problems with this as long as he held the proper handling and storage permits and insurances since none of the chemicals were supposed to have any health risks. At first every thing was ok as he was purchasing them in small quantities , a few pallets and drums at a time then he decided that he needed to bring some things in bulk quantities. And hauled in a used 10,000 gallon fiberglass tank I told him under no circumstances was he to place any thing in that tank until it had been inspected, certified and properly installed with a containment barrier incase of a spill. So the tank laid there for a couple of weeks then one Friday evening late he receives a delivery of 5000 gallons of what should have been 10% caustic soda. He proceeded to have it pumped into the storage tank, instead of refilling all of his drums. Then he left it over the weekend the stuff became unstable and heated up, it turned out to be 90% caustic soda 10% water instead of the other way round.
Sometime Friday night the end of the tank gave way and all 5000 gallons spilled out, causing hundreds of thousands of damage of my neighbor’s equipment that he had stored out side and a toxic environmental spill that cost thousands of dollars to cleanup. My insurance refused to do any thing my neighbor’s insurance did not cover this type of spill and the guy who had caused it had not paid his premiums My landlord said I should not have subleased to him never mind that he was the one who had asked me personally to do so. The city was going to fine me for storing toxic chemicals on my property even though the permit had been filed and approved. The guy took off and no one knew where he had gone. So between my neighbor and I we had to pay for the clean up the damages to our personal properties fell on us as well. Then the landlord cancelled both of our leases and gave us 30 days to move out, or pay triple rent until we were out. Fortunately we both had other places to relocate he owned some land out side of town and I had recently rented another larger property and was planning to relocate anyway. The other property still had a couple of month to month subleased tenets so I had to allow them some time to move but started shifting my stuff there and stored it outside it took 3 months to get every thing moved and the building brought up to city code for my type of operation, and another 3 months to get things organizes well enough to begin operations again. So the loss of 6 months time and the cash out of pocket outlay placed me pretty deep in debt.
By March of 1999 we had started back in business slowly and much smaller than I had been before. About the only thing that attributed to my being able to remain in business was my selling off many tons of scrap metal that was laying on the property. A friend had rented the property 2 years before my move with a 5year lease and a buy option of first refusal and had sub leased it to several individuals to park their trucks and do minor repairs to their trucks and equipment, the main building he had rented out to 3 guys one was fabricating dump truck bodies that I had done a lot of the design work for him, another had a truck repair and cleaning business the other was using about 3000sq feet for storage. I took over the lease, with their combined rents while not yielding much income was at least enough to keep the lease payments up to date. When I moved my company into the main building this caused him to no longer be able to rent out part of it to them, 2 of them I was able to relocate into a couple of the smaller buildings once I had them repaired the other moved out as his business was growing and needed more room than I could provide.
There was still almost enough income from the rents to cover my lease,
One of the first jobs I did in the new location was to fabricate a pair of 33 ft long beams for a heavy haul trailer they were 300 ton capacity for the pair
Through out 1999 and into 2000 I did many small jobs but not any thing large enough to be worth while. Near the middle of 2000 a friend of mine merged his hydraulic business with mine then together we were making ends meet a little better, then late in 2000 we acquired a contract to build a large order of a new type of parking machine. I felt the per unit price was a little too low but we decided to build them any way and try to make up the difference down the road. There were a couple major flaws in his design that were not discovered until testing had been done but by this time we were fully committed to the contract having received monies for deposit and a major portion of production parts had already been purchased and paid for. I did some redesigning and we paid for retesting to get the certifications of safety. And designed a special manifold valve block for the hydraulics that would save us hundreds of dollars on each machine, the only problem was we had to pay up front for 200 of them to get them made. And commit to buy 1000 over the next 12 months. Cost over runs and delayed testing caused us to have a significant loss per machine for the first order of 50 units. The next order of 25 we netted a small profit. At that rate we could expect to be operating in the black with a fair margin of return within 200 additional units or about 8 months production, at our present production rate.
We felt that we needed to put into motion an advertising campaign and vie for distributors since hiring salesmen all over the country would not be feasible. The prospectus that we prepared for the next 3 years if implemented would have placed our company producing 50 machines per month with an annual net well within a respectable range. 2 things happened about this time first my partner had 2 severe heart attacks thus becoming unable to continue taking care of the administration part of the company second our one major customer became involved with machines made by an overseas manufacture.
This caused to lose out on future orders from him, we had acquired another customer on the west coast that was beginning to buy a few custom machines from us, and while these yielded a higher profit potential they took up a lot of time and could not be made in any type of regular production basis.
In late 2000 I got my first computer and a friend installed the new 3d cad design program that he had, from that I taught my self, within a couple of weeks I was using it to do my drawings when I would make a part in the program and then made an assembly from that I could tell instantly if I had them the correct shape and size. it basically opened up whole new aspect of my designing that I had not known. I could check for fit and finish before ever cutting or welding any thing.
I had been able to negotiate a deal with a couple of friends and together we bought the property at a very good price but shortly afterwards one of them needed to bow out of the arrangement due to health reasons leaving me owning 1/3rd and the other with2/3rds he took one of the buildings for his business and relocated to the property.
In the spring of 2002 my customer in California sold 2 custom freight lifts to a company in Kuwait Kuwait Kuwait only to start packing a 45ft container with some of my most important stuff to ship to Kuwait
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household products. I didn’t have a chance to build it into a viable income before I reenlisted and went to
While in
Here is a list of the courses I assisted in.
Automotive charging systems 1&2
Power steering systems
Automatic transmissions 1and 2
Clutch and manual transmissions
Chassis straightening 1 and 2
Auto body 1 2 and 3
Engine diagnostics and tuning 1 2 and 3
Automotive electrical main and sub systems 1and 2
Painting and trim repair 1 through 4
Upholstery and glass repair 1 and 2
Brakes and alignment 1 and 2
Practical welding 1 and 2
With my background in mechanics both as I was growing up and the military schools, many times I conducted the lab studies while the professor held class room counsel sessions.
Some of the projects included the cutting of 2 cars in half then welding them back together connecting the rear of one with the front of the other then making the repairs look as if neither car had been touched, and afterwards having them inspected by the German (Fahrzeug-Hauptuntersuchung, common “TUV”) to see if they could locate any repairs that had been performed. Another was to disassemble a car down to the last nut and bolt then catalog and label every part with the manufactures part numbers then over the next several courses of study have the students reassemble the parts into major components then into a fully restored auto, then have it inspected by the TUV. In 1976 a 10 year old vehicle had to pass 1200 inspection points to be registered with German tags
Another project of mine that we turned into a lab study course was I built up a 383cubic inch Dodge engine for my pickup. We polished every interior surface I bought many high performance racing parts then proceeded to make sure they were balanced in every way and polished for the proper clearances to be used in a high performance street vehicle. I used all of the best parts available from Chrysler direct connection at that time. When the engine was finished it tested out to just less than 600 hp running on a carburetor with out a turbo. I put the engine and the 4 speed close ratio transmission in my 3 year old dodge pickup. Also on that truck I designed and built an onboard CTIS {central tire inflation system} I installed a
On some of my TDY assignments while in Germany
Advanced ranger training @ Ft Campbell KY
Parachute Jump school @ Ft
Helicopter Gunner school @ Ft Rucker AL
Combat diving school @ Key West Fl
Geographical logistics school @ Grafenwere
Structural demolitions school @ Grafenwere
Tactical nuclear ballistic systems control leadership course Hoenfelds
Field communications repair Hoenfields
Total times TDY while in
My longest time on TDY while stationed in
During my weekends I went on VOLKS
I left the Army in 1977 and went to work at a company that built oilfield geological surveying and logging equipment. The company was Energy Products Inc, Where I worked sometimes as many as 120 hours per week in 5 months I had received 10 raises in salary and was earning more than the plant foreman. I attended the Womack Hydraulics design and service school at night for while. after that I was design-building hydraulic crane booms and winches as well as the control consoles, it was also one of my duties to train the new personnel as they were hired, and to instruct the customers in the operations of the equipment. I left that company in early 1978 due to the long hours I was working was having a very negative effect on my family.
I then went to work at Watson Foundation drilling Inc. That was involved in manufacturing drilling equipment, where I was the senior fabrication and mechanical design specialist. While working there I reworked most of their fabrication jigs and fixtures to improve the processes of welding fabrication. In addition I helped in the redesign of all of their products. I worked there for a little over a year then a friend asked me if I would run his marine construction company designing and building marinas and private boat houses. We built dozens of stationary as well as floating boat storage units. Many had hoists to lift the boats out of the water. In addition we built several retaining walls to counter act the erosion of coil into the lake.
In late 1979 he asked me if I would consider building an oilfield drill rig derrick for a man he knew. Since it was the beginning of winter it was becoming too cold for working around the water, I thought why not.
I hired a couple of guys and we built the derrick while doing this I convinced the man to tell his customer that he should allow us to build a complete rig, using as many components from his old rig as possible he thought that was a good idea. So George Bankie the owner of the shop made arrangements through the Boswell High school to send as many as 20 students over for on the job training and extra credits. I taught them how to weld how to do layout work and blueprint reading, the proper way to use shop equipment how to read machine shop measuring instruments, and so many more practical every day shop procedures. We could only allow them to work a maximum of 30 hours per week as per
One of the young men latter went on to owning his own mobile welding shop, over the years I hired him many times to take care of some of my customers when I was unable to do so His work quality was every bit as good as what I would do.
I personally designed the entire rig. Specs are as follows
Derrick: 72 ft tubular square tested load 400,000 lbs
Draw works: double drum, primary drum 16 in core diameter Lebus grooved for 1 1/8 inch wire rope, floating main shaft 24 inch Fawick air clutch, brakes 330deg wrap 9x42” drum air actuated release positive spring lock. Non water cooled.
Secondary drum 16” core Lebus grooved 1 1/8 inch wire rope, floating main shaft 28 inch Fawick air clutch, brakes 330 deg wrap 10 x48 drum air actuated release positive spring lock Water spray cooling.
Chain driven, 2 speeds/ 5 speed main transmission
Engine/s 2 Ford industrial 460 cu inch propane fueled connected to a pair of C6 automatic transmissions that I modified to manually up and down shift only. These were connected to a chain type compounding unit could be operated on either or both engines
The compound unit (my design) powered the main transmission of the draw works and the rotary drilling table.
Rotary table, Hacker machine 15inch
The trailer / substructure I built from a used military tank retriever trailer modified on the rear to be the drilling platform
The entire drilling rig could be operated by a crew of 4
The derrick had a shifting crown that when deployed in one direction the Kelly and swivel would be positioned over the hole in the opposite shift the Traveling blocks with the bails and elevators were over the hole for raising or lowering the drill string and either adding or removing the drill stem.
The make up and break out tongs were hydraulically operated by cylinders mounted in the derrick.
The derrick was hydraulically raised as well.
The Mud pump and its related articles we mounted on its own trailer
The trailer that transported the dog house (Control Shack) and fuel supply was a converted 48 ft Dry van.
The drill string and collars were transported in a rolling pipe box
In total there were 4 trailers every thing could be set up in less than 3 hours and be ready to drill.
The second rig was much the same except we used a Cat diesel 375 hp engine and an Allison 7 speed transmission and mounted every thing lower in the trailer. Giving a totally flat working floor from front to rear even the draw works was mounted below deck
During the construction of the drill rig the customer asked me if I could possibly build him an annular blow out preventer, He furnished me with the rubber internal bladder as it is called. I took all of the diminutions and designed a unit based on machined steel and thick pipe or tubing I provided a local machine shop with the drawings for the parts required than welded them into an assembly, after testing it was found that my design was not only less expensive to build but yielded a 15% higher closing strength the results of this started at least 3 companies to copy and manufacture my unit. Under the names of TEXAS B.O.P. / DIAMOND BLOW OUT PREVENTERS / and mine just called Frank’s BOP. In the next 3 years close to 300 B.O.P.s were made.
In the fall of 1980 I bought my first portable welding machine and rigged up as a contract welder in the spring of 1981 I went out on my own my first contract was with a company named Sunbelt Drilling and productions I was hired as a welder and as a consulting design engineer and later when the company sold to the Walter Kidde corporation I helped work on and do some designing on the largest (at that time) land based drilling ring in the world. During the winter of 1981 I built a few more of the annular blow out preventers that I had designed.
In March of 1982 the Ft. Worth Boat Club contracted me to design and build a barge and pile driver and build an extension to their marina the unit I built had a 40 ft mast and a 1700 lb drop hammer I hired 2 guys and we built a 400 ft extension with a break water and 10 ft wide walkway, driving over 200 steel pilings more than 20 ft into the lake in 30 to 40 ft of water. Since the slip frames were required to be bolted together from under water I built a breathable air compressor to keep from continuously having to have my dive tanks refilled. During the course of building the marina I spent over 300 hours under water and I certified 3 divers for shore and shallow (up to 40’) diving.
After this I built several personal piers and boat storage facilities, many of these I built lifts in them to raise the boats out of the water.
In late 1983 a friend of mine asked me if I would consider going partners with him and another man to start a dock building company on a newly completed lake. Since the water level had not reached its stable level we bought an older truck mounted crane I designed and built a pile driver to be suspended from the boom with an operators station on it I made a 1000 lb drop hammer that was shot filled making it a dead blow this increased the amount of available kinetic energy transferred into each hammer strike by 45% it was powered by a 14 hp engine, I built the winch with a quick release clutch and a catch brake to stop the drum after the hammer strike. The first time we used it we drove 30 pipe pilings to a depth of 14 feet in one day. I then designed and built another barge with a derrick and hammer set up, this one had a 250 hp V8 engine and a 2500 lb shot filled hammer I designed a hydraulic clutch and brake set up that was air operated and a guide system that allowed us to set up to 5 pilings without having to continuously re square and measure, this also served as a long floating walkway for constructing the docks, the barge also had retractable axles under it to allow transport from one lake to another with ease. We could move onto a lake and be in operation very quickly. I also made several piling clamps that acted as quick scaffolding supports. With our equipment that I had built we could construct an average sized boat house and dock in just under 4 to 5 days. I then built a machine to coat Styrofoam blocks with polyurethane to protect them from becoming water logged and prevent fish and animals from destroying the floatation for the floating boat storage and marinas that we built. During this time I did design consulting for a company that manufactured oilfield related equipment and automotive lifts. By mid 1984 I was spending so much time working my welding and repair business and helping design lifts that the dock building portion of my business was suffering so I sold out to my partners to this day I have not collected all of my selling price as the company started a down ward spiral in sales shortly after I sold out. While doing work with the Gooch Research and Development Corporation I learned a lot about automotive lifts from some of the other engineers and designers and got involved in the development of a new line of products called Car Stackers. I had my other customers to consider as well so only just worked there a few hours a week. One of my other customers was Arthur Equipment where I worked as a contract fabricator and welder on caterpillar equipment, rebuilding all types and models of Cat. Equipment and the various earth moving equipment that goes with them. I repaired them back to factory condition and sometimes better than factory condition. I also did many modifications to them. I worked there most of the time for about 5 years. While there I would disassemble a dozer or scraper or loader or excavator and other machines sometimes all the way down to the bare frames then repair any thing that needed doing and reassemble them I would design an make many special tools to help my job to become easier, like a portable boring machine to bore out the bearing and shaft locations after I had welded them up. I converted 992C loaders into huge forklifts for military applications, I designed a machine to remove rocks from fields for agriculture that would till the earth 30 inches deep remove all stones larger than 1 ½ inches level the soil inject nutrients and convey the rocks to a haul off support vehicle. I have taken D11 Dozer “U” type blades and remanufactured them into a straight type design using all of the original parts to accept factory replacement cutting edges. While working for Arthur Equipment I sometimes drove a truck in his transportation division. Since I held the proper driving license for this I sometimes would drive a tractor trailer rig that had as many as 18 axles and could haul 200 to 300 thousand pounds. I also had several short term contracts on pipe line jobs at refineries, and cryogenic chemical plants, as well as oil, natural gas and water distribution and delivery lines up to 96 inches in diameter. And I worked on what is called shut downs at some factories like TXI cement plant and at Chaparral Steel mill, sometimes these shutdowns would require me to work 7 days a week at 18 hours per day for up to 2 to 3 months. I worked on the structure of several of the water parks and theme parks in the area, sometimes I would be required to operate many different types of heavy equipment or mechanical and hydraulic cranes up to 200 tons with 200 foot long booms at places like Wet and Wild, Six Flags over
In 1988 Bill Gooch the man who used to own GRAND (Gooch research and Development) Called me to offer me a position with his company. I had recently suffered a back injury while I Had been able to return to work going almost everything that I had been doing I felt that I was in need of a change. He offered me 10% of the company any vehicle/s I needed world travel and a senior position the plant and installations manager,
Along with a decent monthly salary if I would come on board this was on a Saturday on Monday I learned that Mr. Arthur was going to sell his business of 15 years, he told me that the buyer had asked that I stay on and become a regular employee of the firm but no prospect of much more than that. This made up my mind for me I knew I was walking away from double of what I was going to take as a salary at Car-Stackers; however the prospect of the other benefits outweighed the upfront money.
The company had been formally in business for a couple of years they had approximately 200 of their car parking machines installed around the country, and were in a constant state of updating and design changes. They held several patents on their design that were supposedly very strong in nature, leaving few known options that could have been economically circumvented. One of the first things I did was design a set of welding fixtures for production basis. In so doing I suggested several enhancements to the designs. Then on the weekends I started completely redesigning the double parking lift to accept a wider range of applications first I designed the columns and power rail so that the power rail could be installed in either direction and on either side and to have a multiple lock setting for different rise heights. Also different heights of columns could be used while still using the same length of cables or chains to lift with allowing for installations in reduced height areas. Next I changed up the platforms and standardized them to match the triple parking machine, reducing the required amount of inventory needed by half. I also designed an adjustable lifting attachment this made the machines more versatile to suit the customers’ needs and again reduced or required inventory. At the same time it speeded up our manufacturing process, and reduced the amount of weld fixtures needed this in turn yielded a 3 5% savings on required floor space. It had only taken me less than one month to make all of these changes working both Saturdays and Sundays, our plant was very large and had several areas that were not being used so keeping everything under wraps like in a skunk works posed no problems, finally one Sunday I installed the machine in our back parking lot, on Monday I demonstrated it Bill Gooch took one look at it and said that he couldn’t believe that I had completely redesigned his invention all without infringing on the patents and creating another 20 points that could be applied for. I told him of what I had been planning in my redesign to reduce inventory load, standardize our product line make a machine that had more capabilities, reduce the manufacturing time save floor space in the plant and reduce the overall cost of our machines without compromising on quality or reliability, and at the same time reduce shipping costs But the most important thing was to have a more user friendly, better looking unit. We then started redesigning our triple to use many of the same parts as the double. This was in Nov of 1988, over the next couple of years we did many design changes to the triple stackers but my initial redesign of the double was hardly changes at all only some very minor cosmetic changes were made, with the exceptions of building a heavy duty unit that had a much higher capacity.
I went to
When I returned to
In1991 I went to
I rented the building next to our factory for some side jobs that way I could do some other design work without it interfering in our parking machine manufacture. One of my prior customers needed a hydraulically raised turn table for his heavy haul trailer so he could make his trailer into a modular unit and haul other specialty items like very long vessels having a turntable in front and one mounted to the rear 6 axle group allowed him to remove the bed of the trailer and use it as a dolly setup this saved him about 25,000 lbs without the bed. The tower and turn table weighed 4,000 lbs and would raise 20 inches with a 200 ton cap., and could be raised or lowered while driving.
In 1992 I did much of the same hauling installing redesigning and I went to Argentina and Hawaii for installs of our parking machines. In late 1992 we sold our company to a corporation that had manufacturing in South-Africa also in 1992 I opened up my machine/fabrication shop. As a clause in the sale of car-stackers International Inc I retained the rights of manufacture and repairs for all of our existing customers. I also kept much of the fabricated and machined stock and all of the fabrication and machining fixtures. I did not retain any drawings or copies of records of sales. Except for the ones that had purchased service agreements with me, I also leased all of the equipment from the principle owner since it was not part of the sale, this equipment together with the equipment that I owned allowed me to have a functional operating factory. With the inventories or raw materials left over from the sale of the company and the equipment I started trying to build up a customer base for custom freight lifts as that would not constitute an infringement of the sale agreement, the corporation that bought the car-stacker line contacted me as well to fabricate much of the critical parts, because of their arrogance at the time of the sale they thought they did not need to hire me to relocate to South Africa to run their factory.
They also learned the hard way that they needed the fixtures that now belonged to me. I spent half of 1993 making fixtures for them to metric specifications and sending them to South Africa, also in 1993 I started doing a lot of hydraulic cylinder repairs and machining for a Friend of mine who had a Hydraulic repair center.
I started getting a good customer base in the heavy haul trucking industry, building trailer parts and doing repairs modifying the trucks to pull the removable goose neck trailers, mounting extra axles under trucks redesigning the suspensions systems on them adding winches and auxiliary transmissions. I had men that I didn’t even know show up at my shop late at night after hearing about me and driving sometimes 2000 miles just to have their repairs done or send me a brand new truck from as far away as
In 1995 I went to
About the middle of 1995 the city started road construction in front of my shop and none of my heavy haul customers could get their trucks into my shop so they were forced to go else where regular trucks and trailers could deliver and pickup from me but my business suffered greatly with a loss of over 60% of my customers, and 75% of my business. They finally finished in late 1996, but the damage to my business was horrific.
My local customer base was slowly returning in1997. The man who owned the concrete cutter contacted me and asked me to see if I could come up with something to break out a chimney from a 45 story building. He had taken over the contract from another company that had spent 3 weeks trying to break it out but had only removed the top 20 feet of brick work and about 6 feet from the top. The contract called for him to be finished with the complete removal in less than 30 days from the date of his starting but he had been awarded a 15 day grace period to start as they had discovered some asbestos that had to be removed. I went with him to take a look at what he needed and to make my recommendations. The chimney was about 4 feet inside diameter at the top and 6 ½ feet at the bottom; it was 10 inches thick at the top and 18 inches thick at the bottom. It had a double row of 1 inch rebar on4 inch centers and was wrapped with a double row or 5/8 inch rebars every 8 inches, and was still over 535 feet tall going right up through the center of the building so any form of blasting was impossible and jack hammering had proved useless. I explained to Larry how I planed to design a machine to use the chimney’s strength against its self by building a set up that would operate similar to the jaws of life only on a much bigger scale to push outward from inside and be lowered and rotated as needed. What I came up with I called the Arms of destruction to briefly explain what it looked like think of a pair of steel arms slightly rounded each being 1 feet long 2 ½ inch thick beveled to less than ½ inch along the outside edge joined at the top with a double link for lifting and about 1/3 of the way down pivoting on a turnbuckle having a 4 inch diameter thread, and a 8 inch hydraulic cylinder held in the lower portion to push outwards. The 5000 psi cylinder pushing on the arms caused the outer curved beveled surface to crumble the concrete the stiffness of the rebar caused an explosive action when pressure was applied. It took about 12 days co build then by the time the all clear was given by the environmental inspector we had every thing in place to start. The first day we removed 4 floors worth of the chimney, allowing the rubble to fall to the bottom and out a Shute to be removed. It was the general contractor’s responsibility to remove the rubble. After 12 hours he stopped us from breaking any more until he could get things cleaned up as his 3 skid steer loaders couldn’t keep up.10 days later we completed the break out of the chimney. And ahead of the original time table that had been set prior to the finding asbestos in the ceilings. After that the contractor called on me a few times to design things for them but I mostly refused to do any designs because they did not pay my customer like they should have. He had to take them to court over his money due him on some other projects. Larry had paid me up front and gave me a nice bonus for helping him. Another project in early 1993 was for one of my heavy haul customers, Estivan Molnar. He wanted to make his 3+3+3+4axle tractor trailer rig rear steer able I had already made the hydraulic tower for him so now he needed to be able to steer the back 6 axles I built 4 cylinders and mounted them on the group for and aft of the pivot then made a clip on walkway and seat for the rear bumper of the trailer when required to either raise the load or steer around a fight corner someone would ride on the back. Later on a new truck I designed a coaxial steering system that had a small steering wheel in the center of the trucks steering wheel and an auxiliary steering set up that could either be used by the passenger or taken out side for ground observance while steering, but this wasn’t until 1998. Also for him I designed and built a turn table that raised by air it had 24 inches of rise and was 12 inches tall when lowered, and could lift 150,000 lbs.
1997 thorough 1998 I made a few car stackers and a few ramps for the trucks then I made a hydraulic tubing bender and we built an order of stocking carts, the customer and I settled on a per piece price that should have netted both of us a small profit, however from the time we made the contract till the time we were able to start purchasing the materials many of the prices had close to doubled. Steel prices had gone up by 30% the hardware had gone up by 70%. By the time we had completed the order both of us had maxed out all of our credit cards and had to sell several items just to try and meet payroll. Looking back on it now, we would have been better off paying the revocation of contract clause at the beginning when the first delay of funds transfer was encountered. The revocation clause was 30% of the total order but that would have been thousands of dollars less than the loss we suffered. We rebuilt a rotary jet bead blasting machine for another company that turned into a loss due to the customer not honoring the final payment for the additional work performed, again a loss of several thousand dollars. In July of 1998 my landlord asked me to sub lease some space at the rear of my building to a guy that did soil stabilizing. So I built several injection machines to mount on caterpillar loaders. These machines each had 10 hollow rods 12 feet long that were pushed into the ground then a mixture of chemicals was injected to harden up and stabilize the soil to reduce cold wet or dry weather heaving and cracking
He wanted to store some wet and dry chemicals on my property. I had no problems with this as long as he held the proper handling and storage permits and insurances since none of the chemicals were supposed to have any health risks. At first every thing was ok as he was purchasing them in small quantities , a few pallets and drums at a time then he decided that he needed to bring some things in bulk quantities. And hauled in a used 10,000 gallon fiberglass tank I told him under no circumstances was he to place any thing in that tank until it had been inspected, certified and properly installed with a containment barrier incase of a spill. So the tank laid there for a couple of weeks then one Friday evening late he receives a delivery of 5000 gallons of what should have been 10% caustic soda. He proceeded to have it pumped into the storage tank, instead of refilling all of his drums. Then he left it over the weekend the stuff became unstable and heated up, it turned out to be 90% caustic soda 10% water instead of the other way round.
Sometime Friday night the end of the tank gave way and all 5000 gallons spilled out, causing hundreds of thousands of damage of my neighbor’s equipment that he had stored out side and a toxic environmental spill that cost thousands of dollars to cleanup. My insurance refused to do any thing my neighbor’s insurance did not cover this type of spill and the guy who had caused it had not paid his premiums My landlord said I should not have subleased to him never mind that he was the one who had asked me personally to do so. The city was going to fine me for storing toxic chemicals on my property even though the permit had been filed and approved. The guy took off and no one knew where he had gone. So between my neighbor and I we had to pay for the clean up the damages to our personal properties fell on us as well. Then the landlord cancelled both of our leases and gave us 30 days to move out, or pay triple rent until we were out. Fortunately we both had other places to relocate he owned some land out side of town and I had recently rented another larger property and was planning to relocate anyway. The other property still had a couple of month to month subleased tenets so I had to allow them some time to move but started shifting my stuff there and stored it outside it took 3 months to get every thing moved and the building brought up to city code for my type of operation, and another 3 months to get things organizes well enough to begin operations again. So the loss of 6 months time and the cash out of pocket outlay placed me pretty deep in debt.
By March of 1999 we had started back in business slowly and much smaller than I had been before. About the only thing that attributed to my being able to remain in business was my selling off many tons of scrap metal that was laying on the property. A friend had rented the property 2 years before my move with a 5year lease and a buy option of first refusal and had sub leased it to several individuals to park their trucks and do minor repairs to their trucks and equipment, the main building he had rented out to 3 guys one was fabricating dump truck bodies that I had done a lot of the design work for him, another had a truck repair and cleaning business the other was using about 3000sq feet for storage. I took over the lease, with their combined rents while not yielding much income was at least enough to keep the lease payments up to date. When I moved my company into the main building this caused him to no longer be able to rent out part of it to them, 2 of them I was able to relocate into a couple of the smaller buildings once I had them repaired the other moved out as his business was growing and needed more room than I could provide.
There was still almost enough income from the rents to cover my lease,
One of the first jobs I did in the new location was to fabricate a pair of 33 ft long beams for a heavy haul trailer they were 300 ton capacity for the pair
Through out 1999 and into 2000 I did many small jobs but not any thing large enough to be worth while. Near the middle of 2000 a friend of mine merged his hydraulic business with mine then together we were making ends meet a little better, then late in 2000 we acquired a contract to build a large order of a new type of parking machine. I felt the per unit price was a little too low but we decided to build them any way and try to make up the difference down the road. There were a couple major flaws in his design that were not discovered until testing had been done but by this time we were fully committed to the contract having received monies for deposit and a major portion of production parts had already been purchased and paid for. I did some redesigning and we paid for retesting to get the certifications of safety. And designed a special manifold valve block for the hydraulics that would save us hundreds of dollars on each machine, the only problem was we had to pay up front for 200 of them to get them made. And commit to buy 1000 over the next 12 months. Cost over runs and delayed testing caused us to have a significant loss per machine for the first order of 50 units. The next order of 25 we netted a small profit. At that rate we could expect to be operating in the black with a fair margin of return within 200 additional units or about 8 months production, at our present production rate.
We felt that we needed to put into motion an advertising campaign and vie for distributors since hiring salesmen all over the country would not be feasible. The prospectus that we prepared for the next 3 years if implemented would have placed our company producing 50 machines per month with an annual net well within a respectable range. 2 things happened about this time first my partner had 2 severe heart attacks thus becoming unable to continue taking care of the administration part of the company second our one major customer became involved with machines made by an overseas manufacture.
This caused to lose out on future orders from him, we had acquired another customer on the west coast that was beginning to buy a few custom machines from us, and while these yielded a higher profit potential they took up a lot of time and could not be made in any type of regular production basis.
In late 2000 I got my first computer and a friend installed the new 3d cad design program that he had, from that I taught my self, within a couple of weeks I was using it to do my drawings when I would make a part in the program and then made an assembly from that I could tell instantly if I had them the correct shape and size. it basically opened up whole new aspect of my designing that I had not known. I could check for fit and finish before ever cutting or welding any thing.
I had been able to negotiate a deal with a couple of friends and together we bought the property at a very good price but shortly afterwards one of them needed to bow out of the arrangement due to health reasons leaving me owning 1/3rd and the other with2/3rds he took one of the buildings for his business and relocated to the property.