34 | FORBES ASIA MAY 2017
South. One reason he hasn’t moved the company is that he and
Quick like living in New York.
Quick, 54, has been in Dutchess County since he was 5.
His father and grandfather worked at Taylor. Burdis, 64, grew
up in Troy, New York, another has-been manufacturing town,
and ended up at Taylor because, years earlier, he had dated the
daughter of the owner-president. That fellow had plenty of in-
herited money and didn’t need to squeeze every nickel out of
the clamps. Toward the end of his life he had Burdis and Quick
gradually acquire his shares at an affordable price.
Another anchor is Taylor’s capacious factory, vacant when
Burdis bought it three years ago and moved the business from
cramped quarters downtown. The building used to accommo-
date 225 workers at a firm making parts for power lines. Heirs
sold that business to Hubbell Inc. Hubbell axed the workers
and moved production to Mexico.
Spread across 2 acres, Taylor’s factory hands work efficient-
ly. On a recent day one of them kept four metalworking ma-
chines busy at once. Others tinkered with a flooring nester that
looks like a giant Foosball game.
To understand what this product does, it helps to know that
in the floorboard mills of the Southeast “nester” usually refers
to a person—someone who snatches boards coming off a con-
veyor belt in random lengths, hastily rearranges them so that
each row of one to five pieces is just so long, and bundles the
rows into a stack.
Not long after Brad Quick designed a contraption to do the
work and wrote 7,000 lines of C++ to run it, Burdis got a call
from a desperate mill manager in Mississippi. “I have eight nest-
ers and four of them just called in sick,” he said, ordering three of
the $115,000 machines. The robotic nester plucks up 12 boards,
ponders, for a milli second, which of 1,585 combinations makes
the best row, then spits out the selection.
Is there competition from Asia? Not much in the tools for
cabinet factories and none in nesters. Says Burdis: “Chinese
firms are happy to make rudimentary machines that are fine
for employees making Chinese wages but are no good for em-
ployees making North American wages.”
For his part, Burdis buys American when he can. Taylor’s four
numerically controlled machining centers came from Califor-
nia. But business is business. Two welding robots and a spanking
new $325,000 steel-cutting laser, as well as the programmable
logic controllers that go into products, are all from Japan.
Taylor, of course, must not only fend off imports but also
find customers who can do the same. China knocked out a lot of
the North Carolina furniture factories that used to be buyers of
clamping machines. It hasn’t yet eliminated the American facto-
ries that make custom cabinets for kitchen remodeling jobs.
As for a hostile buyout, Taylor is safe. Between them Burdis
and Quick own 85% of the shares and have three sons in the
business. It seems New York is going to have this factory for a
while longer.RESURRECTION
Schatz Federal Bearings was one of Poughkeepsie’s largest employers, with 1,150 workers as late as 1956. Crippled by a 15-month strike, it went
bust in 1980. It lives on, via some assets sold at the bankruptcy auction.
Housed in a building a few hundred yards from the abandoned factory of the old company is a new entity, debt-free and profitable. The 83
employees of Schatz Bearing Corp. eschew mass production in favor of custom orders, quick turnarounds and high-end products for aerospace.
Some of their ball bearings are made to specs measured in microns and cost thousands of dollars apiece.
Wouldn’t Texas be a lower-cost location? Yes, says president Stephen Pomeroy, who has an engineering Ph.D. from MIT. But moving would
entail an arduous process of getting recertified for airplane contracts. He’s going to stay put.FORBES ASIA
MANUFACTURING
F