Lynn machine company eyes expansion

LYNN – The heavy machinery clanging and banging inside a Farrar Street building is music to the ears of George Cabrera, a Lynn resident who is raising three children with his wife, Patsi, on the salary he earns at Sterling Machine Company, Inc.Sterling manufactures metal pieces with names like bushings and sleeves that are assembled by other companies into parts used in engines, including jet engines built at General Electric?s River Works.Sterling has been in business 48 years and most of its 35 workers are Lynn residents who, along with President Scott Livingston, are planning an expansion to take Sterling to a newer, bigger building in Lynn or the Greater Lynn area.?Our current location can?t handle the growth,” Livingston said.The move is probably three years away, but Sterling is buying new machines and helping employees, including veteran workers such as Cabrera and Peter Gagnon, a Lynn resident who has worked for Sterling for 30 years, match “lean” work practices to the skills they have mastered over decades.Hunched over a “honing” machine as a cascade of oil flows over his hands, Gagnon puts the finishing touches on small bushings so that their diameters match a measurement that is a fraction of the width of one human hair.?We specialize in difficult-to-machine materials,” Livingston said.Gagnon?s wife, Martha, hates the smell of honing oil that always seems to follow her husband home from work no matter how thoroughly he washes his hands, but the couple, who live off of Summer Street, depend on Gagnon for their income with Martha having been out of work for almost two months.Gagnon describes himself as part of “a dying breed” of hands-on machinists who started their trades in the days when machines were manually operated and workers sharpened their own tools, but Livingston said Gagnon is a mentor who is training the next generation of machinists.His mentorship is part of Sterling?s commitment to spend $150,000 to train workers in ways to reduce waste and maximize efficiency.The Massachusetts Workforce Training Fund provided some of the training money.For Cabrera, the training translates into organizing his work routine so that he does not have to run around Sterling assembling parts and tools before he turns on the machine he operates.Using small, three-sided carbide blades called “inserts,” Cabrera mills heat-hardened steel into jet engine parts.?Lean manufacturing shows us what we can do better and faster,” Cabrera said.Cabrera?s father was a machinist and Cabrera spent boyhood summers at his dad?s shop performing simple tasks. He studied machining at Lynn Vocational and Technical Institute and started with Sterling in 1988.His 21-year-old son, Jonathan, is in college; his youngest son, Michael, is 13, and 18-year-old Vannessa attends Tech but is not eying a career as a machinist.