“We mostly serve companies in our local area,” says Solomon Kilaghbian, co-owner and general manager of the company. “We machine 316 stainless, aluminum, brass, and plastics, and we build a lot of precision aircraft fittings. and valves for our customers. We take great pride in our service and I do all my deliveries personally, because I like to establish close relationships with our customers. I don’t like to package parts and ship via UPS, because I want to be sure the parts are delivered exactly the way we finish them in the shop. Our customers like that kind of relationship. We’ve always done business like that, and I don’t see any reason to change.”

Rozak Engineering presently occupies a 2000 sq ft

facility in a quiet Brea neighborhood and employs 9 people, including Kilaghbian and Kathy Franz in the front office.

“We have seven people in the shop,” he says, “and four of them have been here more than ten years. All of our employees are dedicated to providing the best quality parts we can produce. They take a lot of pride in their work and our company. They watch not only for their own errors, but for customer mistakes, too. We often call our customers and suggest better ways to make their parts, or we catch design errors. Rather than just making the parts according to print, we feel we’re part of our customer’s team. If they’ve got something wrong, we want it fixed, so all the parts we make will work the right way. We run our business almost like a small family, and our employees are very loyal.”

Originally a Manual Milling Shop

Rozak Engineering was founded as a manual milling shop in 1981 by Kilaghbian’s father and a partner, who combined their two first names, Robert and Zakaria, to get the Rozak name. In 1988 Kilaghbian left college, where he was studying mechanical engineering, to join his father and partner at Rozak.

“My engineering background, especially the math, was very helpful,” he says. “My father taught me to run the manual mills and a lot of other shop skills that have been extremely useful ever since.”

Kilaghbian says that Rozak remained all manual milling until 1988 when it bought its first CNC mill.

“Until then all we had was a Bridgeport and a Lagun,” he recalls, “but we had a close friend who encouraged us to buy a CNC mill, so we bought a Fadal 4020. My father knew we needed to modernize, but he was never interested in CNC. ‘You take care of that part,’ he told me. ‘I’ll handle the manual mills.’ So that’s how we divided the work up.”

Today, Rozak operates 2 Fadal mills, including a Fadal VMC40 with a 5th axis rotary table, 2 Femco Durga 25 lathes, 2 Femco HL15 lathes and its latest acquisition, a Takisawa-T EX308 live-tool, CNC 3-axis lathe.

“We still have and use the old Bridgeport and Lagun mills,” says Kilaghbian. “We keep all our equipment in first-class condition, so it lasts a long time, really.”

Turning Takes Over

In 1994, with two Fadal mills in operation, Kilaghbian decided to expand the services offered by Rozak.

“About then things started slowing down,” he says. “Some of our customers had started taking work to China, and there was a recession around then, too, so I realized we were too heavily into milling and needed to diversify. We had always taken in some turning work along with the milling, but I always farmed it out to our friends because I trusted them. But then I decided to keep the work in house, so we bought our first lathe, a Femco Durga 25, which had twin turrets. The twin turrets were great, because we had enough tools to do roughing and finishing in one setup. That was a big plus.”

Kilaghbian, who says he makes buying decisions very cautiously, was pleasantly surprised at the response he had from his customers to his move.

“It was about a year later that I realized we were getting a lot of lathe work in,” he says. “We were picking up new customers because of it, too. We were working with aircraft valve and solenoid manufacturers, producing precision parts with very tight tolerances. So, we bought another Durga 25, and in ‘97 we bought a Femco HL15. We now have two of each of those.”
Within a couple of years, Kilaghbian was forced to realize that the nature of Rozak had changed completely. It was no longer a milling only job shop.

“Over the years, as we added more lathes, turning really became the bulk of our business,” he says. “Our mills had become more support for turning than anything else. I found we were using them more and more for second ops to finish up turned parts. You know, doing holes, milling hexes, cutting flats, that sort of thing.”

Things were going well, but Kilaghbian now faced another problem. He now had 2 mills and 4 lathes packed into his 2000 sq ft shop, which was on a 5-year lease.

“We were in a real space crunch,” he says, “but we had no choice. We shifted things around, putting machines within a few inches of each other, and I told myself this is it. This is the last machine we can ever put in this shop. You know, there is no way we can add another machine here. We’re at the limit.”

Handling and Set Up Problems

One result of Rozak’s success with its shift into doing mostly lathe work was that Kilaghbian was now faced with having to do too many setups.

“We were doing very well,” he says, “getting new customers and higher volumes of 500 and 1000 pieces. But most of the lathe work we got also required simple milling operations, too. That led to several problems. One was we were doing too many setups. The other was we were overloading our mills. We occasionally missed our delivery schedules because our parts were stuck in boxes waiting for a chance to get on the mills. I had to do something. We specialized in on-time delivery and I didn’t want to jeopardize our relationships with our customers.”

One More Machine

Kilaghbian’s idea that he couldn’t get another machine in his shop turned out to be not quite true.

“I studied our handling and set up problems, and decided that the only answer was to get a new lathe with milling capability,” he says. “I wanted a machine that could do precision turning as well as most of the light milling we were doing as second ops.”

Kilaghbian, following his nature to be very thorough, investigated the available solutions, and finally decided on purchasing a Takisawa-T EX308 live-tool, CNC 3-axis lathe.

“Buying that machine was a bit scary, because it would be the most expensive machine we had,” he says, “but that fear turned to pleasure once we put it into operation. The Takisawa-T has a C-axis, driven tools, 12-station auto-indexing turret and a Fanuc 21IT control with a manual-guide programming system. It can turn up to 10.2”, but we usually don’t go above 8”. One of the main things I like about it is that its turret does not interfere with its chuck.”

Lots of Benefits

As it turned out, one of Rozak’s employees was familiar with live-tool machining, so Kilaghbian was able to get the machine going very quickly.

“I was on a tight budget,” he says, “but, even so, I got an amazing amount of capability for the dollars. On the Takisawa-T every station can be live tools, if you like. The live tools have their own belt-driven spindle motor, which engages the tools as they come to the turning station.”
How has the new machine worked for Rozak?

“It has solved a lot of problems for us, more than I bargained for,” Kilaghbian says. “We’re getting most parts off in one set up, which frees our mills. We’ve virtually eliminated the need for expensive fixturing and we no longer have to do much deburring. The parts come off the machine very clean. Our operators just do a little touch up while the next parts are running. It’s really saved us a lot of money.”

Another major benefit was also somewhat unexpected.

“The machine has really increased our capabilities,” Kilaghbian says. “We’re now bidding on jobs we couldn’t get before, because with the Takisawa-T we’re much more competitive, both in dollars and with delivery times. What amazed me is that I always thought that machines like this could only be justified with high-volume parts, but the Takisawa-T is competitive even on five to ten parts. You really can’t beat that.”

A Long Way from Manual Milling

Rozak Engineering has come a long way from its early days as a manual milling shop, but Kilaghbian believes it still has a long way to go.

“Use of live tooling on the Takisawa-T has really opened my eyes,” he says. “It’s not that scary to jump right in, so we’re now planning a different kind of future for the company. We’re looking at buying our own building in Fullerton, the next town over from us. And then, of course, we’ll need more machines and more customers. We’ll be adding more live tooling machines, and they’ll probably be Takisawa-T’s. They’re good machines.”

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