Sunday, February 4, 2007
Staff photo by John Ewing
After shaping a machine gun barrel at an automated lathe, David McKnight moves it to a polishing machine at the General Dynamics plant in Saco.
GUN TYPES
MK47
The state-of-the-art 40mm MK47 Advanced Lightweight Grenade Launcher uses fire control technology, lightweight construction, and airburst ammunition. The MK47 uses computer systems that allows soldiers to program a delay into the grenade's detonation, allowing them to fire the round through a window or into a bunker and then explode.
XM307
The XM307, also known as the Advanced Crew Served Weapon, is a lightweight, portable grenade machine gun constructed of titanium, carbon fiber and plastics. It fires 25mm grenades. The new guns are still in the System Development and Demonstration phase. The 307 can swap barrels; the weapon becomes the XM312 and fires as a .50-caliber machine gun.
MK19
The General Dynamics Saco Operations-produced MK19 is a belt-fed, crew-served 40mm grenade machine gun. The company has firm contracts for the MK19 through October of 2008.
M2HB
The M2HB Machine Gun has been built at GD Saco since 1979. The company has produced 30,000 of the guns.
The state-of-the-art 40mm MK47 Advanced Lightweight Grenade Launcher uses fire control technology, lightweight construction, and airburst ammunition. The MK47 uses computer systems that allows soldiers to program a delay into the grenade's detonation, allowing them to fire the round through a window or into a bunker and then explode.
XM307
The XM307, also known as the Advanced Crew Served Weapon, is a lightweight, portable grenade machine gun constructed of titanium, carbon fiber and plastics. It fires 25mm grenades. The new guns are still in the System Development and Demonstration phase. The 307 can swap barrels; the weapon becomes the XM312 and fires as a .50-caliber machine gun.
MK19
The General Dynamics Saco Operations-produced MK19 is a belt-fed, crew-served 40mm grenade machine gun. The company has firm contracts for the MK19 through October of 2008.
M2HB
The M2HB Machine Gun has been built at GD Saco since 1979. The company has produced 30,000 of the guns.
SACO - The local General Dynamics Armament and Technical Products operation hit a low point in terms of work force in 2004, when a sparse 179 people populated the massive 450,000-square-foot facility.
Whole warehouse-sized sections of the plant had literally gone dark - the company didn't bother turning on the lights in those unused areas. Two of the company's bread-and-butter lines, the M2HB .50-caliber machine gun, and the MK19 40mm grenade machine gun, had been mothballed for several years when their quotas had been met.
Then, said Gary L. LaPerriere, director of operations at the Saco plant, "things got hot overseas."
"It came back with a vengeance," said LaPerriere.
Over the last few years, demand for GD Saco's products - gun systems and replacement barrels used by each branch of the military - has exploded as America's forces have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company now employs 330 people, an 84 percent increase from mid-2004, just three short years ago.
Both the M2 and MK19 are back in production; GD Saco has firm contracts for the MK19 through October of 2008. Last year the plant made 23,830 M2 barrels. (Gun barrels are replaceable, the "disposable lighter" of the weapons world, LaPerriere explained, as accuracy can decline after 4,000 to 5,000 rounds have traveled through them.)
The company increased people and equipment, and is looking to do more of the same. Based on demand for the 25mm barrel used on the Bradley fighting vehicles, GD Saco hopes to hire about 19 more workers. They've got a $500,000 lathe coming that will be the centerpiece of a new manufacturing cell based on the 25mm line. The company now makes 10 25mm barrels a day; government demand is for 15.
LaPerriere wants to meet that demand. He knows from experience that if he can't, the work will go to a competitor - a Fabrique Nationale, Sabre Defence, Starwin or one of the many "mom and pop" operations out there. Last year GD Saco made almost 24,000 M2 barrels, and the government needed 7,000 more. That work went to a competitor.
The government's obviously satisfied with GD Saco's work. The business keeps coming in, including an $8.6 million contract awarded earlier this week for production of the MK47 Striker, a lightweight 40mm grenade launcher.
But, noted Loren Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based think tank, wars don't last forever.
"The question is what happens when the war ends, and what kind of backlog does the company have to carry it through a period of declining demand?" Thompson said.
FOCUS ON FUNDAMENTALS
LaPerriere said that GD Saco is the "center of manufacturing excellence" for GD's Armament and Technical Products division, which has a total of 2,300 employees at seven locations. Saco's forte is manufacturing taking raw steel and turning it into precision weapons. Other parts of the business worry about things like force reduction and geopolitical predictions. Other units go after the contracts. Saco fills them.
"My job is to make quality products on time, at the lowest possible costs," said LaPerriere. "Give me the work and I'll perform."
The company continues to hone its manufacturing through worker training, process improvements and capital investment. GD bought the Saco operations in 2000. The company immediately invested about $3 million in facility improvements at the circa-1952 plant. While a number of defense contractors pursued aerospace and IT businesses, GD also maintained focus on basic units, and that's benefited the company during this time of conflict, said Thompson.
"General Dynamics has always invested by the numbers. In other words, it isn't impressed by big ideas, but it is always impressed by a strong balance sheet," said Thompson. "That led it to buy operations like Saco at a time when they were out of favor. The same applies to Bath Iron Works."
The company has invested between $2.5 million and $3 million in equipment each year since GD acquired it, said LaPerriere. And in the last few years, they've begun to use the equipment in smarter ways, through lean manufacturing initiatives. For example, the company has gone to manufacturing cells - where a variety of jobs are performed on parts in a concentrated area, rather than spread throughout the factory based on where the tradesmen were located.
An M19 bolt unit used to travel a total of 7,390 feet as it moved around the factory, from one worker to another, and it took eight hours to complete each piece. Now tradesmen are clustered around an M19 bolt cell, and each worker is cross-trained and so can do different jobs. The piece now travels about 560 feet, and is completed in 4.15 hours.
One of the unique facets of the Saco plant is its capacity to take raw billets (short, stocky, round blanks of steel) and transform them into finished products. The first step for most of the barrels is the hot forge.
Robotic machines feed the billets into the forge, where the metal glows orange, heated to 2,100 degrees. It's then worked into the hammer forge. There, machines strike the billet with up to 200 tons of force.
Each billet elongates as it's struck repeatedly - think of what happens to a chunk of clay when you hit it; it stretches out. GD Saco gets two barrels out of each billet; GD forges 70 in a shift, for 140 barrels, and GD runs three shifts a day. The hot barrels then automatically move through the next steps: quenched in water, reheated for stress relief and other variations.
Then the barrels move into production for machining, boring, plating and other steps.
SHORTAGE OF SKILLED LABOR
While the company wants to hire more workers, it can't find any skilled tradesman in the local labor pool. So LaPerriere said he hires unskilled workers and trains them. The jobs pay an average $18 an hour, plus benefits, and it's an incentive shop - productive workers can put in eight hours and take home pay for up to 12 hours.
"Give me someone who has passion, who has desire to do what we do, and I can train them to run a machine," he said.
LaPerriere's challenge now lies in the demographics of his work force. It's aging, and many will be retiring in coming years. He has young, inexperienced workers at the other end. He needs to balance the amount of work coming in to keep everyone employed, with the goal of having older workers retire while he hires younger ones. The worst case for him would be if he has to have layoffs due to lack of work (the factory's unionized, and the younger employees would be first to go) and then be faced with a bunch of retirements.
If that were to happen, his work force would be too small, and he'd be unable to meet customer demand.
But while the future of the war in Iraq may be uncertain, work is still likely in GD Saco's future.
"Although we can see U.S. forces coming out of Iraq, both political parties are calling for an expansion of the Army and Marine Corps," said Thompson, the analyst. "There could be growth even in absence of a presence in Iraq."
LaPerriere said he didn't believe the market for his factory's products would be disappearing anytime soon.
"I see big green Army out there for years to come," he said.
Staff Writer Matt Wickenheiser can be contacted at 791-6316 or at:
mwickenheiser@pressherald
.com
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