[jimcolt]

I have been in the Hardings plant many times....although mostly working with the big Hypertherm CNC plasma's.....and helping out with a few metalurgy issues. I know our salesman has (with Maine Oxy) sold dozens of Hypertherm hand plasma's there, and I have seen many of them!....although I guess I'm not sure if there are more or less than there are the T-D's.

jim

[GrandLordKhorne]

Ok, Hardings is a completely different story than the main ship yard (in fact it used to be a separate company and in a lot of respects is still treated that way). But Hardings is less than 1/10th the size of the yard and it is primarily just a panel and small part production facility (EBMF is the pipe works). And I will happily admit that Hardings has much more up to date cutting equipment than the yard, but if you look around you will still see the little black Thermal Dynamics units all over the place out there too. But size wise you need to understand, Hardings has a day time crew in the sub 200 person range. The yard has something like 4000 day time workers. The old Plazmaster 80 units in the yard are like flys, there everywhere (I’m 3rd shift quality for GD-BIW). Jokingly I ask to see if the tool crib even had Hypertherm consumables in the yard, I was told they could only be acquired at the big crib in the machine shop. Thermal Dynamics consumables on the other hand are laying out in bins at the main yard, so you can grab a hand full any time you want or need them. I’m not suggesting that Hypertherm is in any way not great, I’m just stating that the perception is incorrect that BIW uses Hypertherm equipment on a “large” scale. Thought it has more to do I think with the fact that the old 80’s will just not die.


Though I digress, I have seen the big CNC Plasma you are talking about and it is vary vary cool.


Interesting historic side note: During the war (WWII) BIW never produced liberty ships and if you ask people who work for BIW they will say as much (we built destroyers). But Hardings built Liberty ships and they have a huge poster/banner about it as you walk in the door. One of the quirks about BIW is that if you work for BIW, the yard is BIW, Hardings and EBMF are treated like part of the General Dynamics family but are also that sort of cousin you only see on Sunday thing. A big part of that is that BIW pride has a lot to do with warship production and as such we treat the satellite facilities as separate entities. So if you walked up to a yard worker and said BIW, the assumption is automatically that you mean the yard. And if you asked most people who work at Hardings who they work for most would tell you General Dynamics rather than BIW.