Home Work In Harwinton
People speak often of cottage industries, but it’s not usually a machine shop inside of a house that they’re referring to.
Meet Thomas and Priscilla Bronson, proprietors of UNI Machine and Manufacturing in Harwinton — a home-based machine shop on Orchard Hill Road that manufactures grounding wire.
The wire grounds electrical connections in houses and buildings; basically, it’s used in most electrical work to reduce the risk of shock.
The work day at UNI is a manufacturing world version of domestic tranquility. In the garage, Thomas uses a machine to pull the wire to length. Back in the house, Priscilla performs what’s known as a “secondary operation”: her job is affixing a screw to the wire.
Garage Industry
The couple’s main customer is Metallics in Bristol, which distributes a range of manufactured products.
The two have been making wire in the house since 1998, after Thomas Bronson sold his manufacturing business in Terryville, which made springs and other wire-based products.
“I’m basically semi-retired now,” he said. “My wife works at it more than I do. I play a lot of golf.”
The idea of a machine shop inside a house seems a good metaphor for the state of manufacturing in Harwinton — a sleepy bedroom community of roughly 6,000. The town’s manufacturing businesses are difficult to find, hidden in residential areas.
There’s just not that much manufacturing in town,” said Frank Rondano, owner of Frank Rondano Inc. and Harwinton Engineering and Drilling, which install drilling equipment. “I don’t know why that is.”
“Probably because there’s no real industrial area to speak of to do ‘real’ manufacturing,” he said. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
Take for instance E & E Tool Manufacturing Co., which has been in town for 30 years and is in its second generation of family ownership.
The machine shop manufactures tooling for a variety of industries, from aerospace to injection molding to automotive manufacturing.
“We’re lucky enough to be diversified so when some things are slower, we can stay busy,” said Bill Clark, a co-owner of the business which was started by his father, Edward.
The nine-person shop specializes in using a type of equipment known as a wire EDM, a device that drills and hollows out metal using electronic charges rather than drill bits or other milling equipment.
Within that subset, Clark said, E & E is known for its ability to use wire EDM technology to hollow out hunks of metal that are very thick — as much as 15 inches.
Its customers are companies who use the tools made at E & E to manufacture products that end up going to consumers.
Many of those products are familiar to consumers, although many wouldn’t realize their roots in Harwinton.
“Most Chryslers or Fords that you see driving down the street probably were made using some kind of tooling we manufactured — be it to make the steering columns, tubes, or linkages in the cars’ transmissions,” Clark said. “We have even been doing a lot of tooling that is used to make many of the razor blades people shave with.”
Another lesser known Harwinton manufacturer?
Advanced Receiver Research, a three-person, electronic communications equipment manufacturing firm, though based in Burlington, has a small manufacturing facility in town.
Freelance writer Ken St. Onge blogs about manufacturing in Connecticut at NutmegMachine.com.
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