(Signed) F. F. Beall,
Vice-President of Manufacturing.
NORTH AMERICAN MOTORS CO.
Pottstown, Pa.
Our production is about half of what it should be, due to lack of skilled help, in other words, due to lack of machinists. We have not had much trouble in getting green men and we have had no trouble in training these green men to do the operations on the shell both accurately and quickly, but we have had trouble in getting men to maintain the tools or to equip for these operators.
Facing this condition and being unable to obtain machinists, we decided to train men to do machinists’ and toolmakers’ work.
Our scheme as outlined is as follows: We are taking operators who have had experience of a year or more in our shop and are putting them into the school under a good mechanic who fortunately is a teacher also. After a few weeks in the school we are putting them into the tool room as operators, that is, they will be on work where they will get work of a repeating nature and they will stay on the same class of work for a considerable period of time, depending on the man and how fast our other pupils come on, the idea being then to take the first man back again to the school and teach him to operate some other machine tool, then send him back in the tool room, where, after he has operated on the second type of tool for a certain length of time, he would then be of more use, as the tool room foreman could then place him on either one of two machines. For the more attentive and interested men we would continue this scheme and thus teach them the operations of all machines and tools used in the tool room. We have also provided for a certain line of bench training.
Within the next few weeks we hope to be able to take some of our machine tools from the shell shop and put them into this school and we will then train our operators in this school with the idea in mind, as stated in our previous letter, of teaching them the proper care of a machine tool, as we consider this of vital importance. In fact, the writer would say that from observation in other plants and experience here that it is his opinion that one of the greatest, if not the greatest, causes for lack of production in machine shops now on shell work is due to machine breakage, this coming from several causes, among the foremost being the lack of knowledge on the operators’ part.
When the idea of the school was first brought up there was some feeling among the skilled mechanics that the men trained in the school would replace them to the detriment of the mechanic, but this idea has passed or is passing away very rapidly and we find a considerable interest shown by the mechanics in the things that we are teaching. Two of our good machinists who are on maintenance or repair work have asked to be allowed to go to the school so that they may become better workers and get a training on finer work. Others have shown similar interest and we have tentatively agreed to start an evening school this fall for mechanics, our proposal being to work in conjunction with the Y. M. C. A. for shop drawing and the reading of drawings and to use our own shop for special instruction on machine tools.
(Signed) George C. Lees,
Secretary and Works Manager.