An Old School Heartbeat In Auburn | Allied relies on old machining to make high-tech parts
Next time you’re at the doctor’s office for a checkup, ask to see his or her stethoscope. If it’s a Littmann stethoscope, ask if it’s old.
If it is, chances are, it was made by Allied Machined Products of Auburn, a contract manufacturer of, well, machined products, that’s been in business under the same family’s watchful eye since 1946.
Now, Allied isn’t a stethoscope manufacturer, or even a medical device manufacturer. It’s a machine shop that can and will make just about anything out of just about any material you can imagine.
And it’ll do it for just about anyone. Electronics, medical products, computer products, military equipment, plumbing components; the list of things Allied makes is long and varied.
That diversity has been the company’s strength from the beginning, according to Joe Wetton. The company was started on Prescott Street in Worcester by Louis Weber, Wetton and current owner Peter Weber’s grandfather.
“One thing that’s kept us above water is we cut everything,” Wetton said, referring to the wide variety of materials the shop works with.
Today, Allied is run by Wetton along with Peter Weber, his wife Ann Marie Weber, and Brad Weber, Peter’s son.
Family Pride
Allied is primarily an old-school machine shop that concentrates on screw machining. What sets it apart is the fact that it works with so many different materials — brass, plastic, stainless steel, aluminum — and the fact that it still does a fair amount of work by hand.
Like any modern machine shop, there are CNC machines in Allied’s 50,000-square-foot facility off Westec Road in Auburn. The shop, which was at Ballard Street in Worcester for years before building its Auburn facility in 1999, also does Swiss machining, grinding, assembly work and welding.
The only industry Allied keeps itself out of is the automotive industry.
“Automotive can be very lucrative for people who specialize, but it can also be dangerous” for small contractors, Ann Marie Weber said. The company does work in the high-performance aftermarket auto parts industry, however.
In addition to its ability to make almost anything, Allied is unique in the way it goes about making all that stuff.
I could tell by the way Wetton said, “We cut everything,” that the company, and the family that runs it, takes great pride in being very good at what it does.
When the company made Littmann stethoscopes, it made them in screw machines and finished them by hand. That’s a job that gets cranked out in a CNC machine overseas these days.
Running a screw machine is more of an art. It’s 100 percent mechanical and has to be set up with the right tooling for the job. There’s no programming, no “Set it and forget it.” It takes a certain amount of feel, and often a successful job depends on very small adjustments made by a skilled operator able to tap into experience, talent and know-how.
“You have to be clever. You have to think. You have to make it efficient, so someone else can do it,” Wetton explained.
On the screw machine, clever companies like Allied can efficiently and quickly make very sophisticated parts that their customers probably call “mission critical.” Brad Weber showed me a detonator used by the military, a tiny bearing used in mechanical applications and large rings used in equipment that wirelessly transfers large amounts of electricity underground at power plants.
It also leaves Allied with a bit of a dilemma: finding skilled help.
“People don’t come in off the street and say, ‘I want to learn grinding,’ ” Wetton said. And being a contract manufacturer, employees are faced with tight deadlines and tremendous variation.
“We’re looking for people who don’t like to be bored,” Ann Marie Weber said.
Got news for our Industrial Strength? E-mail WBJ Managing Editor Matthew L. Brown at mbrown@wbjournal.com.
Watch as co-owner Brad Weber explains how a screw machine operates:
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