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Old 08-20-2011, 01:33 PM
schnickelfritz schnickelfritz is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: People's Republic of Illinois
Posts: 123
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For the last 17 years, I've been a Mechanical Engineer by trade. In my travels, I've found that there are a lot of manufacturing facilities in out of the way places, usually because the county/city/state offered tax breaks. You'd be suprised some times to see a plant making outboard engines in rural Oklahoma, for instance.

While there are manufacturing plants of great size still within metro areas that were devastated by the nukes or riots (Detroit for one), there are a lot in the middle of nowhere West of the Appalachians.

These facilities, no matter what they made originally, would have a goldmine of talent in the maintenance, engineering, tool room, and assembly personnel, especially the first three. Plus, most places I've worked for had local subcontractors, usually machine shops, that would also be highly valuable.

And let us not forget retirees...some went to the warmer states, but most of the retired toolmakers I know are still in the area and still able to pass along their skills....most of them have 30 years' or more of priceless experience creating tools and parts in the pre-cnc area. If you have nowhere to really go and your 60 years old, why would you in the post TDM era?

I used to work at a plant where the tool room had two lathes with 20 foot beds and 18"+ swing, one Monarch, one American, and they worked as well as they ever had, even though both were built in late 1941 according to their serial data plates. They also had a lot of grinders, mills, and lathes that would be hardly affected by EMP.

Mortars, anyone?
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