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32 www.CNC-West.com CNC WEST October/November 2017 O n the outside Swiss Productions Inc. is a highly skilled, high precision screw machine shop produc- ing more than 3.5 million parts a month. Inside, their core strength comes from being a family owned and run business with manufacturing roots dating back more than 5 de- cades. Timo Lunceford is Swiss Productions General Manager. He married into the family 28 years ago and is an integral part of the management team driving the business. “The company actually started back in the 60’s,” Timo stated. “It was called WV Enterprises for William and Vera. They got divorced and my wife’s grandpa took half and her grandma took the other. Well, Vera incorporated in 1982 as Swiss Productions Inc. and grandpa went on and eventually phased out of business. Swiss Productions Inc. was named after the automated Swiss screw machines we had back then, and still use today.” Vera’s son, Ken Putman is the company’s president and driving force for getting Swiss where they are today. He started working at Swiss Pro- ductions when he was just 16 years old. Today, the Ventura, Ca. based outfit has a 25,000 sq.ft . cus- tom designed manufacturing center. It houses more than 50 CNC and manual machining centers. Entire departments are dedicated to assembly, deburring, tooling, and quality control. “My Father-in-law Ken Putman and uncle, Sr. VP., Richard Pe- trash, built this company on the backs of pre war era screw ma- chines,” explains Timo. “Our Bechler cammachines have patent dates of 1931 and 1932. They spent a lot of time during WW2 making parts for the military, but were originally designed to make components for Swiss watches. When I started 28 years ago about 90% of our machines were the Bechlers. We had nearly 20 of them.” The cams are engineered in a 360-degree radius that shapes the part. All the cams are manufactured in- house to match each job. The nine machines that we have left of the Bechlers, run non-stop every day with a single operator loading a bar every 20 minutes. They churn out 750-800 parts per hour and over 2 million every month. “The part running on them right now is a washer for an aerospace company,” explains Timo. “There is not a machine in the world that can touch the speed and accuracy on those Bechlers. We hold +/- .001 toler- ance on every dimension, ID, OD, and length. We run the spin- dles at 3000 RPM to save the equipment, but they can run at 5-8000 RPM if we needed them to. All our CNC operators are trained on the Bechlers to help them become better machinists because you can’t cheat on a machine like this. You need to re- FAMILY PRECISION FOR 35 YEARS Article by Sean Buur Photos By Sean Buur & Supplied by Swiss Productions SWISS PRODUCTIONS INC. Although all 42 employees are treated as family, nearly 1/3 of the staff at Swiss Productions is related. From L/R: Brandon Petrash-Machinist, Michelle Rogers-CFO, Kevin Rogers-Shop Foreman, Chris Putman-Machinist, Cookie Reyes-Tooling Supervisor, John Lilly-Lead Technician Manager, Joshua Lilly-Machinist, Timo Lunceford-General Manager, Richard Petrash-Sr. VP