Northwest Aerospace News April | May 2019 Issue No. 8 | Page 26

MI manufactures parts for The National Ignition Facility.
The TANDM projects were very large weldments with extensive
machining. Quality control included hundreds of check points.
I
t’s a bittersweet memory
in 2019, 15 years after the
probes landed, as Opportunity
was officially declared
missing in action earlier this
year after a gigantic dust
storm enveloped the entire
planet in June 2018.
The company has grown over
the years organically, as well
as acquiring other firms to
expand its capabilities. The
LaBossier family purchased
Production Machining, Inc.
in 1981 and folded it into
Machinists Inc. in 1995. Then,
in 2018, it took over The Gear
Works, a neighboring firm in
the same industrial park.
“That brought us the ability
to do major gearbox repair
and precision gear machine
work,” Grim said. “It also
doubled our manufacturing
space and allows us to support
larger and more diverse
projects. It’s pretty incredible
stuff.
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“Inside a gearbox, there are a lot of individual gears and components that make it
work, and when a gearbox fails, there’s a myriad of issues it could have. In order to get
it running again, it requires a full diagnostic in our shop, where we will disassemble,
evaluate and fabricate new components and gears using state-of-the-art materials to get
a fully functioning gearbox back to our customers. It really goes beyond repair and into
re-engineering and re-manufacturing.”
NORTHWEST AEROSPACE NEWS