Short Run Swiss Machine

A Phoenix Job Shop Serves Both Low And Medium-Volume Markets With A Quick Changeover Swiss Style Turning Machine

by C.H. Bush

The Phoenix, AZ area boasts nearly 3,000 working machine shops, according to Curtis Rogalski, co-founder and owner of Phoenix, Arizona's machining job shop, R&C Manufacturing Inc.

"Each year we get about 200 new machine-shop start ups in this town," Rogalski says. "We also get about 100 shop failures, which gives us a net growth of about 100 new machine shops a year. A lot of small stuff gets produced in Phoenix. In fact, there are very few large machine shops here. If you go to Des Moines, Iowa and check the number of machine shops there, you'll find maybe 10 and they'll all be monsters. Around here maybe only 50 shops have more than 25 employees. The rest of us are tiny."

To survive and thrive with that kind of competition in an area the size of Phoenix (1.3 million population in the year 2000) Rogalski and his co-founder brother, Rudy, have learned to be really flexible.

"We've survived and grown by being willing and able to do just about any kind of jobs our customers needed, especially in the beginning," Rogalski says. "Nowadays, we've reached a point where we're specializing more in low-to-medium-volume milling and turning, which is a niche we really like."

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