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“A lot of our customers are other machine shops around New England, because they’ll get orders for machining metals, but then one of their customers might have a couple plastic parts. It’s easier for them to subcontract it out,” says Mark Rohlfs, president and one half of the brother-and-sister ownership team of . This realization helped the Deep River, Connecticut, plastics job shop to find a niche, and similarly strategic choices in management, machines and process has helped it thrive and grow through both the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Expansion Through Support

After a little over 20 years working in his father’s shop, Mark Rohlfs founded East Coast Precision in his garage and basement at the start of 2006. He and his brother-in-law would handle machining and quoting, while his sister Nancy Rohlfs, East Coast Precision’s co-owner and treasurer, would handle marketing and accounting. Despite the effects of the Great Recession on the industry as a whole, they were able to attract and keep a large enough customer base to grow, moving into a 5,600-square foot location only a few years into the shop’s life.

Nancy and Mark both credit some of this growth to the shop’s location in southern Connecticut. “Connecticut has a long history of manufacturing and machine shops,” Nancy says. “We have Pratt and Whitney here. We have Sikorsky. We have Electric Boat General Dynamics.” These companies and their support network form a manufacturing ecosystem, but many of these companies specialize in metal, not plastic. When plastic parts arrive — especially high-value plastics like Vespel, which Mark quotes at around $85 an inch before COVID-19 destabilized prices — shops often don’t want to undertake the necessary, yet expensive experimentation to ensure smooth part production. Instead, they can turn to East Coast Precision.

The shop specializes in small parts, ranging in size from a grain of rice to the palm of a hand. Even the smallest of these parts can require holes with tight tolerances, sometimes down to several ten-thousandths of an inch. Part quantities range from 50 pieces to 40,000, and typically fall into the medical or semiconductor industries, with some parts for the chemical industry and the occasional bobbin for electronics in the aerospace industry.

This range of clients has helped the shop weather downturns in any one market. This includes the pandemic, when a surge in the medical market helped make up for lower demand in other markets — and for the challenges of moving into and renovating its current 10,000-square foot facility, which Mark and Nancy had only just purchased at the start of 2020.

Retention Above All

Material sourcing became a universal challenge in the aftermath of the pandemic, affecting East Coast Precision just as much as other shops. The shop is usually able to maintain a turnaround time between four and six weeks, but Mark relates one recent incident where one of its suppliers ran out of a needed material, delaying the job for three months until it made a new batch. Rather than attempt to hide this from the client, Mark immediately let them know and explained the circumstances. As he puts it, clear communication is important no matter whether news is good or bad — and the shop’s communication strategy helps it maintain trust and win repeat business.

Mark and Chris Marchand, East Coast Precision’s shopfloor manager, respond to orders and requests for quotes within a day of their arrival, calling and emailing customers themselves from the shop floor. Recently, some of these quotes have needed adjustment as more customers request paperwork and raw material testing certificates. About half of the shop’s customers now require first-article inspection paperwork, according to Mark, and there have been several occasions when filling out the paperwork for a low-volume run of parts can take longer than the part’s machining cycle. All the same, the shop continues to use its combination of QuickBooks and Excel to manage accounting and scheduling, though it has contracted with a company for a custom ERP system to further smooth out the production process.

East Coast Precision has also taken steps to smooth over the recruitment process. The shop maintains an internship with a local high school and keeps a close eye on Connecticut’s aptitude testing, with both providing long-term employees. Ultimately, though, Mark says that the shop’s secret to personnel success comes down less to initial recruitment than it does to retention. This need is heightened by the fact that East Coast Precision must train even experienced hires in the particularities of plastics machining. As such, Mark says that he and the team try to maintain a friendly environment for employees. This comes through in the shop’s flexible work schedule between 6:00 in the morning and 6:00 at night, which only requires that employees get in their hours, as well as regular check-ins with Mark to ensure that employees have the tools they need to complete their jobs. While the shop does not have a formal upskilling program, it maintains a relationship with a local community college to support employees who do wish to develop new skills.

Efficiency On and Off the Machine

East Coast Precision’s machine lineup focuses on traditional lathes from Hyundai and Hardinge, Swiss-style lathes from Citizen, FANUC RoboDrill mills and mill-turns from Miyano and Star. Many of these machines were present during our visit to East Coast Precision’s previous facility in 2016, but since then, Mark says the shop has added lathes with bar feeders and 3+2-axis mills with indexers. The 3+2 mills have improved efficiency by about 30%, according to Mark, by enabling more complex work in a single setup, but he says the bar feeders on the lathes have been even more impactful, doubling efficiency by enabling overnight automation. These gains don’t have large impacts on the shop’s lead times, he says, as sourcing materials and figuring out the order to run jobs are the largest factors in scheduling, but they have enabled the shop to take on more work.

The shop’s layout and penchant for buying more machines than it strictly needs have also played into its growth. Mark says East Coast Precision operates with a 1:5 operator to machine ratio, and the floor is laid out so that operators can run four machines at once — a design influenced by the shop’s snug origins in Mark’s basement and garage, as well as by its variable cycle times from 50 seconds to 20 minutes. As for purchasing enough machines that the shop can leave several idle, Mark says this is particularly useful for adjusting to the ever-shifting workload the shop sees, with parts essentially able to swap between different mills as needed. For some repeating parts, Nancy says the team is also able to leave a setup in a surplus machine, cutting down on setup time once the repeat rolls back around.

Many of East Coast Precision’s machines are used and refurbished. Of the 34 machines on the shop floor, Mark says that perhaps only seven are new, bought in response to urgent orders that would ensure quick return on investment. The shop has bought the rest of its machines used and sometimes in need of repairs. Mark and Nancy both see this as a worthwhile tradeoff, as the repairs for the machines they choose are often less expensive than a new machine — to the point where Mark sees East Coast Precision’s willingness to invest in and refurbish machines as a competitive advantage.

By contrast, East Coast Precision pays a premium for its tooling. With parts as small as the shop makes, it needs drills that can be smaller than most tool presetters allow, and which are sharp enough to handle all manner of plastics. While the relative softness of plastics results in less tool wear than when machining metal, the flexibility of plastic and its tendency to bend rather than break means every bit of wear has outsized consequences. This means that the lights-out capability of its lathes does carry a caveat, though the shop has long-standing relationships with tooling suppliers it trusts for sharpness, and East Coast Precision does have some proprietary techniques for keeping its tools’ edges sharp. Unlike during our last visit in 2016, these tools are now often standard, requiring less customization on East Coast Precision’s tool grinder and relying more on operator skill when cutting difficult-to-machine shapes.

Life in Plastic

Our previous articles about East Coast Precision have detailed many of the techniques the shop has learned and honed for working with plastic parts. Recent years have made several stand out, and during our most recent visit in December 2024, Nancy and Mark called attention to where general trends in the industry might fall short for their needs, or when seemingly innocuous issues can become outsized issues.

Packaging has long been important to the shop, as its soft parts and their tight tolerances can be fragile. But Nancy noted that the shop has had to reject several boxes of material after material rods punctured the box, as even harder plastics are still soft enough to dent—and dented plastics are useless for the shop’s needs. To avoid causing this issue themselves, East Coast Precision now bubble wraps the small plastic bags in which its parts travel, and the shop invests in higher-quality boxes to minimize the risk of damage.

As mentioned earlier, the shop also is unable to use presetters for many of its smaller tools. Mark says that the presetter they bought is too heavy for these tools and runs the risk of chipping the point of its tools, which would essentially make them useless. He is open to buying a new presetter, but notes that it would need to be lighter duty than most presetters on the market. Vision systems are also not quite fully compatible with the shop’s parts. Out of every hundred parts, Mark says that perhaps 15 can be fully inspected by the shop’s vision system, another 45 can be partially inspected, and the last 40 will be entirely incompatible. Instead, the shop must continue to rely on its toolmaker’s microscopes and gage pins. The latter have their own difficulties due to plastic’s tendency to deform and move on contact, but when handled gently enough, can measure bores.

Vapor polishing has also emerged as one of the shop’s specialties, especially with plastic medical parts. Nancy says that the process requires special care for acrylics and polycarbonates, and that the best results require parts to already have an excellent surface finish. As many metalworking shops do not have the equipment or expertise for this process, Nancy says East Coast Precision wins a lot of vapor polishing work from them. This dynamic tends to lead to deeper business relationships with and further work from these clients, especially when Mark and Nancy note that their shop’s specialty in plastics means a lower risk of tool marks on the part (which vapor polishing cannot remove) and that East Coast has more ability to ensure parts meet the surface finish requirements for vapor polishing.

This symbiotic relationship has helped East Coast Precision grow as a small business, with the shop’s ever-growing experience in its niche helping it stand out to metalworking shops and OEMs alike. This focus on being a reliable partner for companies, a reliable employer for its staff, and a skillful provider in an underserved niche has ensured it survives during difficult business conditions and thrives during better years, lessons shops in any market can use to learn and excel.