Royal Precision Closing

[xian]

http://www.wfsb.com/Global/story.asp?S=4951115

[iacas]

http://www.wfsb.com/Global/story.asp?S=4951115

Something doesn't seem quite right there. Where will Phil get his shafts? Where will thousands of others? What the heck? So True Temper is it, now?

[neudi]

Something doesn't seem quite right there. Where will Phil get his shafts? Where will thousands of others? What the heck? So True Temper is it, now?

That is weird...i just bought rifles too...odd..

[iacas]

From another forum, someone posted this (it's pure speculation I think, but he may know something. Maybe):

Unfortunatly RP is in the process of being purchased, the whole closing down thing is just part of the process. They are coming off one of their best years ever and have secured more OEM biz for 2007 than ever. The fact is that the owner has been in the process of divesting many of his businesses interests and RP is one of them.

[neudi]

that makes a lot more sense...same thing my boss said when i told him...they sell too many golf shafts to close...:)

[Everardo]

I spoke with several other CRC's and sources. The Royal Precision name may not continue but the Rifle, Project X and other model names will. Good news for us and many others

[xian]

Even if that's true, it sounds like whoever is buying them only going to receive a bunch of paperwork. I guess they will get trademarks such as 'Rifle' as well as any patents that RP had on shaft technology. However, it doesn't sound like they will be getting the RP plant, the former RP employees, etc. So it's not like one of those transactions where a new name goes on the building and everything else carries on as usual. Anyone could buy them and stamp the word 'Rifle' on any shaft they wanted.

[Everardo]

Even if that's true, it sounds like whoever is buying them only going to receive a bunch of paperwork. I guess they will get trademarks such as 'Rifle' as well as any patents that RP had on shaft technology. However, it doesn't sound like they will be getting the RP plant, the former RP employees, etc. So it's not like one of those transactions where a new name goes on the building and everything else carries on as usual. Anyone could buy them and stamp the word 'Rifle' on any shaft they wanted.

Word is nobody wanted the plant anyway, dating back to 1924 is was the original Union Hardware/Brunswick Golf building. Even with any rennovations it probably does not meet the requirements of the owners.

[Guest]

I'm a former employee of the Royal Precision/PM Precision plant in Torrington, CT. I still have friends and acquaintances who worked there and among the small group of workers who are staying on as the plant is shut down over the next month or so, dealing with hazardous material disposal, cleanup, etc.
Royal Precision may have had a record year as far as sales goes, but the reason they are closing is that their quality control system was allowed to degenerate to the point that their rejection rate caused them tremendous losses for the past 5-10 years. Simply put, you can sell MILLIONS of widgets at $1.00 each, but if they cost you $1.05 each to make, you'll go out of business.
If your sale price of $1.00 each is a bargain to the consumer, you'll sell LOTS of them, and go out of business FASTER.
Over the past 10 years, the owners and executive board operated the plant in CT by remote control, keeping their corporate headquarters in Arizona. Major decisions were made by people in the plant which increased problems, and were rubber-stamped by the board. The company stock dropped from over $5.00 per share to about $0.20 per share when the president and his family bought up all the outstanding stock at about twenty cents per.
A milestone in this company's failure occurred about 8 years ago, when scrap storage became a problem. Suddenly, the volume of scrap (rejected shafts) increased so much that handling them became a hazard for the material handling people. The engineering staff dealt with this by designing a larger scrap area, with outdoor access. Nobody ever looked into the cause of the increased rejection rate, and how to correct it. Most of the rejected shaft stock had been through most of the processes, all energy intensive operations such as annealing, vail extrusion, polishing and even chrome plating.
Competition and hostility between on-site executives led to lack of communication, and eventually a loss of teamwork throughout the plant.
It should be noted that a work force working in an environment like the one at Royal Precision needs a lot of inspiration. The plant is composed of buildings that date back as far as 1865. It's boiling hot in the summer, freezing in the winter. The air in the plant is fouled by fumes and dust like something out of the 1920's. Most of the manufacturing equipment dates back to the 1950's.
Even the "showpiece" of the Royal Precision shaft manufacturing process, Frequency Matching of shafts in a set, was being done by a very few devices that were falling apart, for which there were no parts lists, schematics, calibration procedures, etc. These devices were invented by a former executive of the company, and the company never obtained the information needed to maintain or replace them as needed.
The biggest problems began to occur in the plant about 5 years ago, when the personell started to be thinned out. Most of this thinning out had more to do with personalities and grudges than with efficiency in mind. People with inspection and quality control responsibilities were looked at as complainers, and gotten rid of, and as a result, the process quality control procedures went to pot. Shafts were being rejected at the plating line, nearly the last operation in the process, for problems which should have been detected at nearly the BEGINNING of the manuafacturing process. Not only did this add to the rejection rate, this type of rejection is very costly, due to the number of operations and the labor time invested in each shaft by the time it reaches the plating operation.
This is a sad event, especially for all the people who will be out of work, with limited or specialized skills that won't help them much in finding new jobs. Don't let someone decieve you into thinking that this plant will be started up again, it won't. If you doubt that, just go up to Torrington, CT and LOOK at the place, then you'll know why.
As someone here noted earlier, if there's any "buying out" it may be in the form of patents, such as the one for the Frequency Matching of shafts in sets, but that's a very small operation at the end of the manufacturing process, and could be adapted to ANY manufacturere's shafts, not just Royal Precision.
If you want to know why this happened, you don't need to look any further than a board of executives who didn't take proper interest as their positions called for.
Sorry for such a windy story here, but after reading the earlier posts, I felt it was important to say what I've just finished saying.

[neudi]

Wow...sounds like a managerial problem after reading that...thanks for posting that for us... i just bought a set of rifles and i love them...hopefully whoever picks them up will do a better job :)

[Everardo]

Well here we go...

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060609/clf030.html?.v=52

[BigAl5150]

Nice little monopoly True Temper has going for them . . .

[Donald MacKenzie]

Not quite a monopoly, but TT now pretty much controls the market for steel iron shafts and steel hybrid/FW shafts. Aside from Nippon, which is just starting to get a foothold, there isn't anyone else doing much volume in that space.

True Temper's done a good job of picking up other brands when the opportunity was there, like Grafalloy. The steel shaft business isn't as profitable as graphite shafts for woods, but there's lots of steady volume. I wonder if this will embolden TT to make a stronger move at the Fujikura/UST/Aldila graphite shaft makers.

[neudi]

good to see that rifles will still be made by a great company.

[Guest]

Just a word to the wise; the old Royal Precision plant is now being cleaned out, and this cleaning will expose THOUSANDS of shafts, dumpsters full which may LOOK good, plated and possibly even with the logo, that had actually been rejected after final operations for some reason. Some such rejections could be simply for the finish being blemished, or even the logo slightly smeared, etc, which wouldn't effect the functionality of the shaft, but they could also have failed for other reasons, including hardness or other metallurgical deficiencies not visble to the naked eye. Problems like that could cause the shaft to actually break after an impact, actually making it dangerous.
In the future, if you get or hear of an offer for RP Rifle shafts at a very good price, especially if they are in large quantities, remember, you could be buying scrap.
They're probably going to pop up on eBay, and a good clue to them being resurrected from a scrap hopper is if the seller's location is in or close to CT.
Another complication in this area is that even the shafts WITHOUT the logo could be "counterfeited" if they are just run through the logo printing equipment, which will probably get scrapped, too, as it is a piece of special equipment that any new user won't have much use for, since it will print the RP logo, unlikely to be used by TT. Also be skeptical of any shafts with stick-on labels, not used by RP, as the taper in the shaft would cause a wrinkle at some point on the label.
Very little of the old RP equipment from the Torrington plant is likely to be transported for use by TT. Most of this equipment is 40-60 years old, and probably would have to be decontaminated of oils and metal dusts before it could even be transported. The Vails, which are used in the stepless shaft manufacture, are very old and very heavy, and probably are older than the equipment TT already has.
I think TT is getting mostly intellectual property, and the RP creditors will get the proceeds of any equipment sales, which won't be much. TT will really be paying for the elimination of potential competitors which might have started using some of RP's procedures.
Kind of a sad thing to see this company close, though; for the first time since just after the Civil War, there won't be anyone working in those old buildings, where generations of families had worked.

[neudi]

Thanks for th eupdate...looks like i bough tmy rifles just in time

[DDBowdoin]

when I found out the closing of RP I snatched a set of PX's just in case True Temper started cutting corners which they are clearly going to do... as a massive company... although maybe we'll see some more stock shafts in rifles considering TT's ability to mass produce