Our Quest for the Holy Grail

This might sound dramatic, but in the world of suspended ceilings, we had a Holy Grail: a ceiling that looked like drywall but performed like an acoustical system. No visible grid. Total sound control. Full accessibility.

For decades, teams tried and failed. The problem? Suspended ceilings require grid for structure and access. Drywall doesn’t offer that and it also lacks acoustic performance.

Then our innovation manager had a bold idea: use the 3P Kaizen (Production Preparation Process) to tackle the problem. He knew we might not solve it in one go, but believed 3P could reveal the path forward.

I was asked to facilitate. The first sessions focused on hiding the visible grid. After many sketches and prototypes, the team landed on a clever idea: use overlapping fabric between tiles. It wasn’t perfect, but it disguised the seams better than anything we’d seen.

Some were disappointed it didn’t fully solve the challenge. But that first step revealed the next: develop a coating that could bind tiles together and create a seamless look without destroying acoustical performance.

The next 3P sessions pushed us farther. Dozens of experiments later, the team found a spray coating that did the trick. We brought in drywall contractors to test it. With their feedback, the final system was born.

After decades of struggle, we had invented a seamless, acoustical, accessible ceiling system. Within months, it hit the market. Today, that innovation drives a growing product category and is a cornerstone of the company’s success.

Breakthroughs rarely come in one giant leap. They’re built through persistence, process, and problem-solving. Sometimes the “Holy Grail” is one prototype away.

What do you do when you’re the Industry Leader – you Improve!

Armstrong World Industries is the global leader in suspended ceilings. That might not seem like much to you, but when you sell over a billion square feet of ceiling tile and the grid to suspend it every year, you’re making a big impact in the construction and housing market.

One of the things that sets Armstrong apart is innovation and forward thinking in all of the things they do. Although other competitors are trying to influence building codes, Armstrong has the strongest presence and is leading the way in making sure office and other spaces are the healthiest, most energy efficient, and quietest they can be.

Paul, the head of codes and standards, was a big fan of my support to other areas of the technology department. We had many conversations on how Lean was helping his colleagues improve their processes and we often wondered how I could support his team’s efforts.

One day, we were talking about codes and standards and how Armstrong’s competitors were making inroads influencing the critical changes for building health and safety. Paul said it seemed Armstrong was losing its leadership position. People were participating on committees and submitting white papers, but weren’t moving the needle in the right direction. He felt we needed a breakthrough to retake our leadership position.

We both realized, almost at the same time, a strategy session could help drive the changes that would maintain our leadership presence. We agreed a Value Stream Mapping (VSM) session was the approach to take.

We plotted and planned. We chartered the event. We invited critical team members, including our internal customers, Sales and Marketing, manufacturing plant representatives, selected engineers and scientists, and members of Paul’s staff.

Our CEO kicked off the event and gave his support to the team. He told us what we were doing would be vital to the successful future for the company. No pressure at all! The team was enthusiastic and energized. But many of them wondered how using Value Stream Mapping would help them create a future that was any different than the path they were on.

There are two critical moments in any VSM event. The first is when you take a Gemba Walk (going to see) through your process. During this walk, the team saw many aspects of the current process that were overly complex and had opportunities for improvement. Many ideas were written down and shared.

The second critical moment happened when the team visibly mapped the current state process on a wall. There were so many steps and delays. There was waste and opportunity beyond anything they had imagined. Now that they could see it, they could do something about it. The ideas flowed even faster. There were so many things within the control of the team, and they prioritized the ideas they thought would make the most difference and could be implemented.

We built plans to attack the most impactful opportunities to drive codes and standards leadership. By the end of the week, we had a roadmap to distance ourselves from our competitors. Everybody won, as the changes would strengthen the health and safety of everyone who inhabits the office, school, and other business spaces. And, because of the alignment of the team and their sponsors, their customers would receive those benefits quickly.

The Unexpected Benefit

It was my first Kaizen event with a new client in Florida. They make building products for the residential market. On my first visit with Brian, my sponsor, I saw many opportunities to apply Kaizen to and made my recommendations. He picked his current pain point, which was labor utilization at the end point of a multi-line operation. The goal of the Kaizen event would be to balance work across all lines and require less labor to support the operation. The people wouldn’t be sent home, they would be redeployed to other parts of the plant where overtime was being used to keep things running.

Brian was the plant manager and Jeff, our team leader, was the operations manager. We built the team with top players, as this first Kaizen event would set the tone for future efforts. We wanted a strong win. Our goals were challenging. Besides improving safety, we needed to reduce labor required by 30 percent.

Messaging to the team had to be supportive and reassuring. No one would lose their jobs by reducing labor required. I worked with Brian and Jeff to write the charter and communicate to the team in ways to strengthen their message and not make them fearful they would be blamed for labor reductions.

Our first day included a Gemba walk to a very hot production floor. It must have been 100 degrees. We watched team members do a lot of waiting and a few quality and cleaning tasks, except at one critical moment: When the pallet was full, it had to be wrapped, strapped, labeled, and removed. All while the next products were coming through the line (albeit at a very slow rate).

There were a few other tasks that took time away from the line, including a quality check every 30 minutes. This required the operator(s) to take a long part from the line, bring it to a saw, cut it to a specified length, and verify density of the product through a weighing process. Operators didn’t like this task for many reasons, including the transport of the product, time away from the line (which could happen at the moment packaging had to occur), and the use of the saw in the hot environment.

When we finished our Gemba walk, the team returned to the meeting room to brainstorm ways to improve things and simplify tasks. They prioritized three activities they thought could reduce effort and labor required: housekeeping, palletization, and product sampling and quality checks.

The housekeeping team created a cart with everything operators needed to maintain and keep the lines clean. All supplies were provided that typically would be searched for during the day, reducing time and effort for all operations.

The palletization team created locations for supplies, developed simpler palletizing methods, and created standard work that greatly reduced the time it took to wrap and palletize the product. This not only simplified things, but also reduced the stress the operators felt when finalizing each pallet of material.

The product sampling and quality check team wanted to reduce the time and effort it took to cut and weigh parts of the finished product. They experimented with relocating the saw, possibly buying a new saw or two, and buying another scale or two. All of those ideas would have helped. But then, someone asked, “Why do we need to cut the product at all?” The light bulb came on. What if they didn’t, and could weigh the finished product, without losing the critical quality information necessary for certification?

Inspired, they found an extra scale and weighed dozens of products, verifying the correlation between their results and the prior method. They met with the quality manager to align around their approach. He helped them build a plan to ensure their method could work. With the statistics confirming their method, the team had to come up with a simple way for operators to do the sampling without having to leave the line.

They mounted a scale to a cart that had height adjustments. Once they configured it properly, the cart could be brought up to the stack of products and one piece (up to 30 feet long) was slid onto the scale to get a quick reading. If too heavy for one person (identified in the standard work), they would get assistance from another operator or the section lead.

This new method turned a messy, hot, heavy, and minutes-long process into mere seconds. It was a huge win. But, even more than that, the need to destroy finished product had been eliminated, saving many hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Why didn’t they come up with this solution before the Kaizen, you may ask? We only know what we know. For the many years of the prior approach, no one had ever questioned it. People just did what they had been trained to do. Kaizen opened our eyes to possibilities and gave us the latitude to try new things. And because of this, we won.

A Little Dab Will Do Ya

In 1991, I was offered a line supervisor position at Armstrong’s ceiling grid factory in Franklin Park Illinois. I had been working as a staff Industrial Engineer at Thomasville Furniture in Thomasville North Carolina, so the position would be my first operations supervisory role.

I spent my first few months at the plant learning everything I could about the manufacture of ceiling grid and the approach I would take to supervising my small crew of factory workers. The only way I knew to learn was to spend as much time as possible on the factory floor, observing, asking questions, and trying to help where I could.

The factory had eleven separate operating lines and each of them made a variety of products. Each line consisted of an unwind station for coils of steel, roll-formers that bent the coil of steel into the shape of the ceiling grid, and a punch press which stamped out the holes and end details for each piece of grid. Finally, there was a packaging station that assisted the operators as they put the finished pieces in a box.

The lines operated fairly well, with limited downtime, until it was time to change over from one product type to the next. If the shape of the grid was changing, rolls on the roll-former would be switched out. If the size or shape of the product were changing, dies in the press would need to be moved or switched out. The process of changing over was long and drawn out and we never started right up after the changeover. I wanted to know more about this, but typically the highest skilled employees did the changeover and didn’t want to be bothered by my questions.

An Observation In Need of a Solution

After a few months of observing things, I decided that I needed to help somehow. I really wasn’t sure what I could do to help. I decided I would first try to better understand press die setup, as it looked more straight-forward than roll former setup. Spending many hours observing what was happening, I noticed that once the dies were placed in the proper location, they were then tightened using bolts. Then, a bar of grid would be stamped and checked for proper placement of holes, end details, and overall length. Tolerances were tight, so the dies would have to be placed accurately.

Every time this was done, the measurements required that the setup operator make adjustments to the location of the dies. I didn’t understand why this was. Why couldn’t he just find the optimal position, tighten the dies, and be ready to run on the first try? He told me that the dies always moved a bit when tightened and he had to tap them to their final position with a mallet. If things went well, he could do this on one additional attempt. If things went poorly, it could take many attempts which added up to many hours of downtime. I thought to myself, “There must be a way to get the dies set properly on the first try.” I didn’t know what to do. Luckily for me, I was about to take a trip that would change the way I thought about this problem.

I was asked to travel to the new headquarters of our joint venture with Worthington Steel in Malvern Pennsylvania. I like to read bit on airplanes so I looked at the bookshelf in the supervisor’s office and saw a book called, “A Revolution in Manufacturing: The SMED System,” written by Shigeo Shingo. I asked the other supervisor if he had read it and if I could borrow it. He told me that Armstrong bought the book for all of their manufacturing sites in the late 1980’s, but he had never read it. He told me I could take it and keep it if I wanted. So, I took this book with me on the airplane and started reading it.

New Way of Thinking Inspired by Socks

It was like a whole new world had opened up to me. Shigeo Shingo developed a changeover reduction process that is used by companies the world over and even is used during pit-stops at auto races. This was just what I needed. But, where to begin? A story in the book about golf told me what to try first. In the story, Mr. Shingo talks about playing golf and getting blisters on his feet at the end of the day. He loved golf, but didn’t love the blisters that came as a result and decided he must reason out how to eliminate them. He used his problem-solving skills and figured out that the blisters came from the rubbing of his socks on his feet when he was swinging the golf clubs. Why were the socks rubbing on his feet? Because there was less friction between the socks and his sweaty feet than there was between the socks and his shoes, which he had put on quite tightly. How would he resolve this? He figured out that by adding another pair of socks on his feet, he could keep the least friction between the two socks and therefore they would rub against each other, rather than rubbing on his feet. Problem solved; blisters eliminated!

So how does this apply to changeover reduction, you may ask? Now that he saw how reducing friction was beneficial, he decided to apply the same idea to press die setup. He also had a problem with dies moving once they were tightened down. He originally had a bolt and one washer that he used to tighten down dies on a smooth press surface. He noticed that the die would move on the smooth press surface when the bolt was tightened securely. Much like the socks, he decided to add an extra washer to the bolt and put a dab of oil between the two washers, guaranteeing that they would have the least friction of any component in the setup. He tried his idea out and it worked. And now, I had something I could try back at the plant when I returned.

Results Even Skeptics Could Not Ignore

When I got back to my plant, I was excited to share what I had learned with my setup operators. I explained what I had read and they were not impressed. “How do sweaty socks help improve changeover time?” they asked. I said I thought we should try an experiment to see if what I read really did work. One of the operators grudgingly agreed to give it a try. I wanted to make sure that we had real data for our experiment, so I asked him to set up a die in position as he normally would. In this case, we set up dial indicators on two corners of the die. They would be used to show us how much the die moved when tightened to the press. We zeroed out the dial indicators just before he made the final tightening of the bolts on the die. One corner mover .007” and the other moved 010”. That might not seem like a lot of movement, but it is more than we could tolerate and would require him to move the die with a mallet, just as he always had to do.

Now it was time to try the new way. We added a washer to each bolt on the die and put a dab of oil between the two washers on each bolt. We zeroed out the dial indicators just before making the final tightening of the bolts on each die. To our amazement, at the final tightening of each bolt, the washers moved, but the readouts on the dial indicators both read 0! There was no movement of the die. “Let me try that again,” he said, and he did. Once again, there was zero movement of the die. This was a breakthrough. Now the other setup operators wanted to try it for themselves. They couldn’t believe it as one by one each of them saw the dial indicators stay at zero, no matter how hard they tightened the bolts on the dies.

We immediately added washers and oil to the dies waiting to be used on the other lines. Then, we modified the other dies on the production lines after we took them out of the presses following production runs. From then on, every die that was set up in our presses maintained its location, saving valuable time, effort, and reducing frustration. I like to think that I would have figured this out on my own, but I realize that we all get set in our ways and sometimes need a story or two to change our thinking. I don’t play golf, but I now have much greater respect for the game and what can be learned from it.

With Persistence and Desire, Anything is Possible

I started working for Thomasville Furniture out of college as an Industrial Engineer.  Born and raised in Maryland and working in North Carolina, I was called “Yankee,” and I had to prove myself worthy every day.  I felt like I was up for the challenge.  My mother reminded me I was born south of the Mason Dixon line, but it didn’t seem to matter to North Carolina natives.

My first assignment was in Thomasville’s veneer plant.  At this plant, many types of veneers were brought together to make beautiful panels used in expensive furniture, more expensive than I could afford.  I was fascinated by the labor-intensive process of veneer making, and spent many hours in the plant observing what was going on and asking lots of questions of the workers.   They seemed amused by the Yankee who was willing to listen to them.

An Expensive and Inefficient Process

One afternoon, I was in the basement of the plant and watched workers put materials into and out of a hot press.  This press was a large, multi-opening machine used to cure and remove moisture from some of the most expensive veneers bought by Thomasville.  The machine looked like a large pizza-oven, and had eight openings, one above the other. 

I watched a crew of six workers place a large metal plate on a table.  After that, they took a “book” of burl veneer – 14 slices from the same log that look generally the same, and spread out each slice on the metal plate.  Then, they put another metal plate on top of all of the slices, creating a metal and veneer sandwich.  This sandwich fit into an opening of the press.  When all eight press openings were filled, a button was pushed, and the press closed on all of the sandwiches.  36 hours later, the sandwiches were removed, all extremely hot, by the same six workers.  Now, the workers had to remove the metal plates without burning themselves or damaging the veneer.  Heat and pressure had created a vacuum inside the veneer sandwiches, so when the plates were removed, the veneer would fly around and break, as it had become drier and more brittle.

This was the most expensive material used in the furniture and the plant was losing much of it in the course of the curing process.  It really bothered me, so one afternoon I decided to talk with the plant manager to see if there was something that could be done. 

Avis Tobin worked for Thomasville for many years.  He was short, very round, kept a cigar in his mouth at all times, and had the type of loud, gravelly voice that would frighten small children away.  I asked him if the “books” of burl veneer could be cured without separating them into single pieces.  He responded, “Son, you just don’t know anything about the veneer business. It can’t be done.  The veneer would stick together and we’d lose everything.”  I wasn’t satisfied with his answer, but it was the most he had ever said to me during my time in the plant.

Opportunity for Change

Six months later, Avis retired and was replaced by a younger plant manager named Bob Ashley.  Bob and I developed a strong working relationship over the next few months, as I was able to complete many projects he requested of me.  One day, while sitting in his office, I brought up my idea of curing the burl veneer in stacks, rather than pieces.  I thought there might be a better way to do it.  Bob thought a minute or two, looked intrigued, and placed a call to the veneer buyer at the plant.  “Do you have any contacts who cure veneer in the general area?” he asked.  The buyer had one in Beaufort North Carolina, which was about four hours from the plant in Thomasville, on the East coast of the state. 

Two weeks later, four of us, the plant manager, veneer buyer, truck driver, and me took a truck load of burl veneer to Beaufort to see if we could cure it without de-stacking it.   When we arrived at the plant, we saw a piece of equipment we had never seen before:  a combination hot press and cold press.  The Beaufort plant cured straight grain veneer in this combination press with two people, one loading a conveyer in front of the hot press, the other unloading a conveyer at the back end of the cold press.  The stacks of grain veneer would be conveyed into the hot press, pressed for a few minutes, conveyed out of the hot press to the cold press, pressed for a few more minutes, and then conveyed out of the press to the operator.

The stacks of straight grain veneer came out of the end fully cured, with no pieces sticking to each other.  Would our burl veneer do the same?  We were invited to put a few stacks of burl veneer into the combination press and try it out.  We did, and when the stacks came out the other end, most of the pieces of veneer were stuck to each other.   We were disappointed.   The operations manager for the plant said, “Oh, I forgot to change the heat and dwell time for the burl veneer.  It has more moisture in it, so I need to adjust the settings for that.”  After he made the change, we tried a few more stacks of burl.  Lo and behold, most of the veneer was cured and hadn’t stuck to any other pieces.  Approximately 20 percent was still stuck.

A Valuable Lesson

We decided that was all we needed to see.  We felt like we would be able to identify the settings required to eliminate the sticking completely.  We drove the four hours back to Thomasville with grand plans to change the way we would cure veneer forever.  I wrote an appropriation request for approximately $250,000 and bought Thomasville’s first combination cold and hot press.  Six months later, it was fully operational.  Manned by two operators, we found the proper settings cured burl veneer in one tenth the time of the prior process, with much less scrap and zero risk of being burned.  After that, I realized the only limitation to solving difficult problems was preconceived notions of what was possible.  If you are willing to take a risk, you may get a breakthrough.  I still use this thinking today, as I help Kaizen teams of all sizes and structures worldwide.

A Tasty Breakthrough

A North American ceilings manufacturer was closing a plant that produced a product no other plant in the division could manufacture, due to specialized, but obsolete technology. They had a customer who was buying millions of square feet of this product annually. They knew they had to come up with an alternative the customer would approve of and keep buying after the old plant was closed.

The product had a heavy texture and was extremely durable and tough.  None of the remaining plants in the division had the capability to produce this particular visual with the same durability and the project team was at a loss to come up with an alternative. They decided to use a Lean technique called Production Preparation Process (3P).  They had very little experience with it, but the stakes were high and they were assured a breakthrough could be achieved by using it.

I was asked to facilitate the Kaizen event with help from a consultant and we would use 3P and its 11-step method to drive the creativity of the team to create, test, and develop the new product in a one-week timeframe. Needless to say, there were a lot of skeptical people in the room, including me.

The first few steps of the 3P are designed to remove all preconceived notions of what the solution should be and force the team to define the true essence of what the customer is asking for. Once done, the team identifies how nature is able to meet those customer requirements. This part of the process usually results in the relaxing of inhibitions and the start of laughter and opening of minds to what might be possible. For some teams, it is a true leap of faith that these steps will lead to something useful.

This team consisted of engineers, designers, scientists, and technicians. We had the use of all of the testing and development facilities for the company and any resource we needed was made available to us. Scientists and engineers are typically more analytical than they are free thinking. Once we got to nature, I saw the team was loosening up and they seemed willing to try something new.

Steps 6 and 7 of a 3P require the team members to come up with 7 ways of solving the problem and then trying them out in real time with available materials. This is called “Moonshining”. During Moonshining, the team members started using available materials in the testing and development facility to come up with new textures and strength properties. Nothing seemed to look like or act like what we wanted. A respected engineer with more than 35 years company experience told us he was going on a shopping trip to find what he needed. We all wondered what he would come back with.

After about an hour, he returned with many different things he bought at a local grocery store, including various cereals, cat litter, salt, and other granular materials. Curious to see what would happen next, we followed him to the testing facility and watched as he poured the various materials, mixed with adhesives, onto boards. Cat litter didn’t look right to him. Then he crushed it, and it still didn’t look right. Next was salt. No good either. Next came cornflakes. He decided to grind them up and poured them on the board. They looked promising. They had the visual texture similar to the customer’s wishes. With the right mixture of adhesives, they might be able to achieve the desired durability. About a dozen trials later, he was able to get a texture and durability the whole team liked.

The team knew it couldn’t use cornflakes in the finished product, but they now knew they could create the proper texture and durability. The rest of the 3P (steps 8 through 11) was spent developing a method to replicate the cornflake texture with materials that could be adhered to the board and painted over in the manufacturing process. At the end of the week, the team was able to provide the overall project team with a concept and method to achieve this new product in an existing manufacturing facility.

Just over a year later, the product was being manufactured in an existing facility, at a reduced cost with better properties than the original product that was manufactured in the closed facility. The customer continues to buy the product to this day, and has no idea that the inspiration for it was found at the grocery store.

Breaking Through - The Edge

In 2005, I was asked to help a team reduce the changeover time of a painting operation at a ceiling tile manufacturing plant in Oregon. The approach I used was SMED – Single Minute Exchange of Die. The goal was to reduce the existing changeover time by 50% or more, while improving the safety of the work.

After training the team, we took a walk on the factory floor to observe a changeover in progress and see if we could generate any improvement ideas. As with most SMED events, we saw a ton of improvement opportunities related to the existing changeover and the team was excited they would be able to help everyone in the process.

Towards the end of the walk, we stopped at the quality testing station and saw something that didn’t look right to us. The Quality Technician was using a box knife to cut four 2-foot edges of the ceiling tile off by hand. It looked difficult, unsafe, and extremely inefficient. When we asked her more about it, she told us she was required to measure the color of the face and edges of the ceiling tiles. The only way to get the colorimeter to read the edge of the ceiling tile was to make these cuts, allowing the tester to be placed directly on the edges. She also told us it made her wrists hurt. On a break, I verified with plant leadership they were also very concerned about this requirement. It was their number one safety concern in the facility and a number of engineers had studied the issue with no practical solution.

Following the walk, the team went back to their meeting room and listed all of the improvement ideas they had. They then prioritized the ones they wanted to work on to reduce changeover time. During the next two days, many of the highest priority ideas were implemented and the team was extremely excited about the improvements they were able to make.

At a break, a mechanic on the team came up to me and asked if it would be ok for him to work on something outside of the prioritized list of improvements the team had identified. I could tell something was bothering him, so I asked him to tell me more about what he was thinking. “Adam, I can’t get that edge cutting process out of my mind. It’s not right that we are putting our people at risk. I think I have a solution, and if you give me an hour to work on it, I can come right back to the team to help out with the other efforts.”

Kaizen is a team sport, and the team needs to be aligned around what everyone is doing. I asked the team what they thought. They enthusiastically supported the mechanic’s efforts. So much so that one of the operators volunteered to help him work on his idea. We couldn’t wait to see what they would come up with.

About an hour and half later, both team members came back with grins a mile wide. They brought a contraption that looked like a standard vise with a two-foot wide angle iron attached to each jaw. Curious, we stopped our other work to watch a demonstration of their invention. They put a 2-foot ceiling tile into the vise vertically, with the edge of the tile in the jaws and closed the vise carefully. Then, with a swift tap, the ceiling tile broke off cleanly at the edge, across the entire 2-foot length. We were stunned.  One of our team members stepped up and tried the next of the four edges, and it broke off just as cleanly. One by one, we all tried it and saw how quick and easy it was to break off the edges. Now, we gave it the ultimate test – we brought it to the Quality Technician and showed her how to use it. She easily broke off the edge and immediately gave the mechanic a hug in a show of gratitude.  It was probably the only hug the mechanic ever got at the plant!

We were so proud, but knew we had to finish our other work and gain alignment from plant leadership that our new method would meet the quality testing requirements. During the rest of the Kaizen, we implemented as many of our improvement ideas as possible, then created an overall changeover procedure that we verified, practiced, and used to train the rest of the operators on the line. The changeover time had been reduced significantly, but we wouldn’t feel like we had won until we implemented the new edge breaking process. So, we decided to build a final report to win over the plant leadership.

We invited plant leadership to see the new changeover procedure, which the team demonstrated for them. Some of the leadership team even participated, to see for themselves how much easier and safer it had become.  They were extremely pleased, but we had saved the best for last.

Our creative mechanic invited the Quality Technician to join him in front of the group of plant leaders. Then, another team member brought out the vise and handed a ceiling tile to the Quality Technician. She put it in the vise, gave it a tap, and the edge broke right off, as clean as could be.  In my life, I have never seen a collective group of people’s jaws drop at the same time, but it happened right then. After they got over their initial shock, the Operations Manager said, “Let me try that.” He did, and got the same result.

Everyone wanted a turn, and when it was over, the Safety Manager said, “This has been our number one safety risk. We have spent over 6 months trying to solve it the conventional way and haven’t been able to do so. Your team worked together and solved it so quickly. We need more teams to help us solve our problems in this way. Thank you!”  Then, she gave the mechanic the second hug he had ever received in the plant. After blushing, he admitted to the group that in all of his years working at the plant, he had never done anything as impactful as this. He also reminded everyone that this was a prototype, so there may be an improved way of doing the work.  Many years later, the original vise was being used in the plant without a complaint.