At least one old adage says, “You wanna make money, you gotta have the right connections.” However, Daniel Schachtel, owner-president of Redlands, CA’s Precision Hermetic Technology, Inc., put a new twist on the adage. He’s made lots of profit by having the right connections, but his are in the shape of high-tech, hermetically sealed circular connectors used in military and commercial aerospace applications.

“It’s odd how things work out,” Schachtel says. “I started this business in 1989 with two partners. We floundered for five years, barely breaking even, so eventually my partners decided to withdraw, leaving me in a sink or swim situation. My problem was I was the money guy. I had no real manufacturing experience. We had subbed out everything except the assembly, so we had no in-house equipment and no in-house machinists, except for a knee mill operator. Truth is, I inherited a mess, but I was determined to turn the company into a profitable operation.”

Which is exactly what Schachtel did. He now keeps 70 (plus or minus a few) employees busy and owns his own 26,000 sq ft building. The company has posted a long string of 15-20% annual growth rates, even through the 2000-2001 recession.

“We’ve done really well,” he says. “I can’t say how much of that is a function of the military build up during the last few years, or how much of it is a function of our products and service, but I would like to think it’s more the latter than the former. And I think it is. As our capabilities grow, we get greater access to bigger customers.”

The Connector Connection

There are a lot of connector manufacturers around, but if you move into the field of hermetically sealed connectors, the field narrows somewhat.

“Our connectors are similar to other military-style connectors,” Schachtel explains. “The main difference is that they have to be air tight. They’re hermetically sealed by fusing glass at about 1800° F. Because our connectors are used in space, they have to be made of highly precise, machined stainless steel and kovar. We have connectors on the Mars Rover, on the space station, on missiles, commercial aircraft, you name it. All of our connectors are electrically and pressure tested. If our connectors didn’t meet all performance requirements, we’d lose our customers fast. It’s not easy to make repairs in space.”

By hanging in at the beginning and by producing a quality product, Shachtel’s company has grown to the point where in any given month it produces as many as 150 jobs, with 120 of those different part numbers.
“Over the course of a year I’d say we probably make a thousand different connectors, a lot of them of our own design,” he says. “Although I really knew nothing about manufacturing connectors when my partners left, I had no choice but to learn fast. I worked hard and it paid off.”

Management Team

Though he was only 29 when his partners left, Schachtel already had developed a hands-off management philosophy, which he believes is one key to his success.

“I think one of the worst things a company owner can do is try to manage day-to-day operations,” he says. “I think you need to have a certain amount of perspective in order to see where you want to go. Not tomorrow or next week, but six months, a year down the road. When you have good people, you try to give them the best tools and stay out of their way. And, of course, you have to give them a happy place to work, which is what I try to do. I have a great team.”

So how did Schachtel go from standing alone with no real base of expert employees to one of the best teams in the connector business?

“I think I was smart,” he says, “but I was lucky, too. There was an old-line connector manufacturer not far from our original site, and they were having management trouble. When I met Steve Snyder, their operations manager, and described Precision Hermetic to him, he was excited by the challenge the company offered. He is now our vp operations and has been with us twelve years.”

Instant Expertise

The bottom line for Schachtel was that bringing Steve Snyder on board gave him virtually instant expertise in the manufacture of hermetically sealed connectors.

“It also gave me access to the full team of managers at the other company,” Schachtel says. “As a result, within a very short time, their machine shop, production, sales and QC managers had joined us. These people had decades of experience building connectors, and they were all very excited about the prospects of getting in on the ground floor of a new company. I give myself credit for being smart enough to grab the team when it became available, but I also consider it a great stroke of luck for me that they became available when they did.”

That influx of expertise solved Schachtel’s management problem, but that was only half of the overall problem.

“We still had no equipment to speak of,” he says. “We had a couple of manual machines, a Bridgeport kneemill and a Hardinge HC lathe, but that was okay back then, because our inhouse production requirment was small.

Gearing Up

Over the next few years Schachtel’s goal was to bring as much work in house as he could afford.

“That meant buying equipment,” he says, “which we did. I bought Cincinnatti Arrow mills and a bunch of CMS lathes, but as we grew we found needed much more sophisticated equipment. In 1998 I discovered Citizen screw machines. When I saw what they could do for me, I instantly became a huge fan of the equipment. As a result, I now have four Citizens, a B12, an L32, an RO4 and my newest one, which is an FL42. With these machines, we run the gamut from 4 millimeters up to 42. It gives us amazing capability.”

Schachtel says his love affair with Citizen started when he discovered that a Citizen L32 could do a job in one setup that normally required five ops, including a trip out to a subcontractor.

“Basically, I saw a part that had 5 operations on it and I said, ‘You know what, there’s got to be a way to do it in one shot.’ Even my guys in the shop weren’t sure it could be done, but over time the Citizen convinced them all.”

One of the problems Schachtel faced was to analyze the difference in setup time between the Citizen screw machine and his conventional lathes.
“Screw machines take longer to set up,” he explains. “Our other lathes took about five hours to set up. The Citizen took about fifteen hours, but it turns out that’s okay. We had to do five-hour setups for five different operations. With the Citizen the setup time was longer, but we got finished parts out of the machine. No more que lines, no more handling, plus the cycle times were much shorter. The Citizens turned out to be real money makers for us.”

Citizen FL42

The FL42 is not a screw machine, but a fixed headstock turning center for parts up to 1.65” x 3.15”.

“Even though the machine only has one turret, the sub spindle can simultaneously run a tool path independent of the main spindle,” Schachtel says, “so the sub will follow the turret, and I can be machining two threads of different pitches at same time, which is pretty impressive. It’s almost like having a twin turret lathe, but without the cost associated with twin turrets. Basically, the FL42 combines some of the best aspects of the screw machine, and it puts them in a package that’s kind of a conventional lathe. I’m thinking it will give us the ability not only to do long runs, but maybe short-run jobs as small as seventy to a hundred pieces. It’s very flexible. I think I’m going to buy at least one more this year.”

And Tomorrow?

What does Schachtel see for the future of his company?

“Well, we’re running two shifts right now, but we have lots of room to grow,” he says. “We’re growing at a nice pace, and I’d like to continue on like that. I’m pretty happy with the way things are now.”

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