From Tradition to Transformation: Century-Old Manual Machine Shop Adds CNCs

For John Bouchard & Sons Co. (JBS), a company that has performed manual machining work since the shop first opened the doors of its downtown Nashville location in 1900, adding CNC capabilities to its machine shop took an ideal set of circumstances.

Finding a Place for CNC Machining

The JBS machine sales and service division, which accounts for nearly a third of the company’s total business alongside castings supply and contracting work, relied on manual mills and lathes for its machine shop business from 1900 until 2022. Manual machines, in the owners’ minds, were better suited for the one-off parts and repair work that made up the shop’s pump and rotating equipment repair work. These parts typically didn’t require much repeatability or pre-programming, which are the primary advantages of CNC machining.

This began to change several years ago when some of the shop's customers began noting in contracts that they wanted their suppliers to have CNC capabilities. JBS even lost one of its long-time customers three years ago after the customer did an evaluation of the shop.

This change led fifth-generation JBS owner Lisa Bouchard Morgan and her husband, longtime president William Morgan, to explore the potential of adding CNC machines to the shop. But instead of buying brand-new machines and sending machinists to classes to learn CNC programming and machining, JBS opted to acquire assets of a CNC business, moving the equipment into its machine shop and hiring the owner to run the machines. The opportunity first presented itself in 2021.

The Disney Acquisition

James Disney, a local shop owner who founded Independent Machining in 2009, had a problem: customer demand had increased so much during the COVID pandemic that he was growing out of his shop.

“It really took off in the last four years, where it was overwhelming,” Disney says. “I stayed busy during COVID. One of my customers — they were in heavy with one of the major food manufacturers and they were just slamming, like they couldn’t keep up. So we stayed busy.”

Disney hadn’t given a ton of thought to the idea of getting acquired by another company. He liked working for himself. But one day in 2022, he got a call from Michael Jackson, a friend who is also a JBS machine shop project manager.

Jackson mentioned JBS’ interest in adding CNC equipment to the shop and asked if Disney was interested in coming to work for “Bouchard.” Despite some initial reluctance, that was just what he did.

Music City Merger

Disney sold Independent Machining’s assets to JBS and began working for the company in April 2022, bringing his customers in the staging, general manufacturing, and food and beverage industries with him. Disney is now on the leadership team within the JBS machine services department, a team that consists of salesmen, two operational leaders and the shop’s department manager.

“I thought it would be a good time to do this because I have something to offer them and I can kind of step back because they’ll have the help I need, and we can grow this thing,” Disney says. “It’s like my company won’t actually die. It’ll live on.”

The acquisition took about six months overall, with initial conversations beginning in late 2021. Installing Disney’s machines in the Nashville shop took about eight weeks.

JBS sold some of the shop’s older manual machine tools and moved others around to make room for the CNCs. They put down a new floor coating and — due to a lack of enough 208-volt power — installed a 75-kilovolt-ampere transformer and new disconnects for each machine to utilize some available 480-volt power. Since JBS is also a mechanical and electrical contractor, it was able to simplify this task by performing the installations in-house.

Not only has Disney’s business been able to live on with its presence at JBS, but some jobs at JBS are now getting completed in half the time they would have taken prior to CNC machining capabilities, and JBS can now accept jobs it wouldn’t have taken in the past.

The shop currently utilizes the CNC equipment for two or three jobs each week, along with occasional work from the air compressor sales and service side of the business. The CNC-specific jobs usually consist of producing between two and 200 parts.

One example of this newfound potential with CNC machining was on display with an order for some bearing blocks for a rotating railway bridge. Operations manager Josh Maddox estimated the job would’ve taken around 160 hours if the shop had attempted to machine the part manually (they instead would have sent that order elsewhere). Instead, with Disney and his three-axis machines, they were able to take the job and complete it in around 40 hours.

Another job called for machining gibb plates for a stamping press repair project. The part had several zig-zag style grooves that increased machining time to around eight hours on a manual mill. When JBS started machining them in the three-axis Cincinnati Milacrons, the parts were done in about four hours.

Maddox estimates that bringing jobs to the CNC machines has led to around 20% efficiency gains overall between shortening lead times and the ability to take on more jobs. The shop even won back the aforementioned customer whose business it had lost a few years ago.

On the air compressor service side of the business, CNC is helping there, too. Rather than purchasing or renting custom tooling for the air compressor service business — something JBS says is both expensive and difficult to source — the machine shop now manufactures these parts in-house, as well as sells them to other distributors.

Passing on the Knowledge

Bringing Disney on board as the lone machinist with CNC experience was a viable option because the shop only runs one shift and has a high-mix, low-volume workload unsuitable for automation. But expanding this department will require more employees with CNC know-how — and already, other machinists at JBS are asking to learn from Disney, showing the initiative that JBS knows is needed as it takes on more CNC work in the future.

“As far as growing and innovating, it has been important for us to have people who want to learn,” says Carver Morgan, machine sales and service leader at JBS.

Currently, the CNC portion of JBS accounts for a small portion of the shop’s workload, but now that they have both the need and the knowledge on staff to grow these capabilities, JBS intends to keep growing that portion.

In addition to cross-training its current employees and having them assist with future CNC work, JBS plans to hire an apprentice for Disney once that side of the business expands beyond one full-time machinist’s capacity. The shop also plans to invest in additional CNC equipment once the current machines are closer to capacity.