(Editor’s note: This is the 11th installment in a monthly series highlighting some of the region’s unsung manufacturers that make products essential to the economy and, in many cases, our way of life. See previous installments here.)
Doug Tracey’s company churns out thousands of meticulously crafted gears, shafts, splines and sprockets each year, but don’t ask him where all those parts are going.
He doesn’t always know. Many times, his clients can’t tell him. Especially if the components end up in top-secret or classified projects.
Sometimes when he’s asked the question, Tracey, the co-owner of Tracey Gear Inc., doing business as Tracey Gear & Precision Shaft in Pawtucket, will point to the sky.
“We’ve done work for NASA and Virgin Galactic, so some of them are likely out there floating in space,” Tracey said. “They won’t always tell me. But if I ask if they’re leaving Earth, I’ve gotten a couple of yeses. Some are in submarines. We’ve done some pretty neat stuff.”
Any visitor to Walt Disney World literally has gripped pieces manufactured by Tracey Gear.
“We made the lap bars for the rollercoasters – Space Mountain and Peter Pan’s Flight – they’re not buried in the machinery. You sit down in the ride and hold them tight. Our guys go down to Orlando, can see them in use, and they can honestly say, ‘We made that!’ ”
Tracey Gear’s parts also are used in the bottling industry, aircraft carriers, oil field equipment, elevators and undersea applications. Locally, Tracey has created pieces for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport.
“My business model is low quantity, high quality. It’s how we stay competitive. An average lot size is only eight to 10 parts,” he said. “Overseas shops can’t deliver the quality we can supply and it’s not cost effective for an American manufacturer to go overseas for a low-quantity run.”
Tracey Gear, located in a 35,000-square-foot factory on the edge of the Darlington neighborhood, employs 29 people. Six are office workers, the rest are skilled craftsmen on the factory floor.
Visitors are hit by the acrid scent of burning oil, the result of using heavy oil as lubrication during the process of machining the parts. It’s the aroma of industry.
“I’m kind of immune to it,” Tracey said. “It’s funny, my kids always say they smell it on me when I come home.”
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SHAVING IT CLOSE:
Ryan Defreitas, shop foreman at Tracey Gear & Precision Shaft, uses a computerized lathe to produce a shaft that will be used in machinery to make beverage cans.
PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS[/caption]
The lubricating oil is used in the gear room, where it’s also used to dissipate the heat as metals rub against each other as operators and machinists cut gears. Synthetic oils, with a biting aroma of their own, are used to cool and lubricate pieces as they’re turned on computer-controlled lathes and finishing grinders.
“It can get a little loud in here,” said Ryan Defreitas, 28, who has risen from intern to foreman in 11 years. “We have collectors hung on the ceiling that collect smoke, fumes and other bad things you would otherwise breathe in.”
Defrietas was a student at William H. Davies Jr. Career & Technical High School in Lincoln when he began his career at Tracey Gear. Manufacturing was in his blood. His father had served as a supervisor for a large machine shop in New Bedford. So, Defreitas saw Tracey Gear as a natural fit.
“As an apprentice, they bumped me around to every department to learn the ropes,” Defreitas said. “I worked on the turning machines, then to the lathe department where I became a supervisor, and now I’m a shop supervisor.”
He says he couldn’t have imagined spending his entire career with one company when he first stepped into the York Avenue factory.
“But now I hope to stick around for a long time,” Defreitas said. “It’s a real nice place to work and the Traceys are great people. I make pretty good money, so I definitely can’t complain.”
SIMPLE START
Tracey Gear was founded in 1945 by Doug’s grandfather, Leo Tracey. He set up shop in the garage at his house.
When Leo first launched the business, all he did was cut gears, Doug Tracey said. Leo Tracey bought a “hobber,” a milling machine that cuts the teeth into gears. Then he hit the road, soliciting business from the nearby textile mills by driving door to door to deal with the mill foremen.
Over time, Tracey Gear moved out of the garage and expanded to take on an array of complicated jobs. Leo Tracey added more-sophisticated machinery and eventually brought on his three sons to help run the company.
In 1972, Leo Tracey retired and sold the company to his sons Mike, Rick and Steve, Doug Tracey’s father.
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IN THE FAMILY: Doug Tracey is the grandson of the founder of Tracey Gear & Precision Shaft in Pawtucket. Now he co-owns the company with his two uncles.
PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS[/caption]
Doug Tracey now co-owns the business with his uncles. His father died in 2012. The younger Tracey started on the very bottom. Through high school and college, he labored on the shop floor doing deburring, shipping, cleaning and maintenance. Eventually, some of the craftsmen trained him to operate some of the machinery.
“I was a decent operator, but never a true machinist,” Doug Tracey said. “There’s a big jump between the two.”
Operators possess an eye for detail, a solid work ethic and a good understanding of how the different measuring instruments work. “And that’s the bare bones,” he said.
“A machinist is at a whole different level,” he said. “They have to understand how fast they can run the machine, understand the tooling, the cycle of operations, how to attack a job. They deserve a ton of respect.”
He almost left the family business for a career in software and finance.
“After college, I did my own thing for 15 years,” he said. He first earned a degree in civil engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Then he earned an MBA at the University of Southern California and moved into finance.
He enjoyed the projects he worked on for big corporations – computer giant Gateway Inc. and the British bank, HSBC, were two of his former employers – but didn’t like the bureaucratic red tape and never felt adequately rewarded.
In 2006, he returned to Pawtucket with a plan to eventually take the reins of the family business. His uncles are involved in the company, but they plan to sell their share of the business to the younger Tracey later this year.
It’s been a deeply rewarding decision, Doug Tracey says.
“The hard work all comes back to me here,” he said. “At HSBC, I netted the company tens of millions, and, while I got a nice bonus, it didn’t come close to reflecting what I saved them.”
He doesn’t sound sour. He’s proud of what Tracey Gear has achieved.
“I’m building the company up for the future and my kids,” he said.
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Employee Wayne Hillier uses a coordinate measurement machine to inspect the bore of a finished worm gear for a military application./PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS[/caption]
SAVVY WORKERS
As of now, Doug Tracey is involved in every facet of the business. He even recruits interns for possible careers in machining. “That’s because my biggest challenge isn’t finding enough work,” Tracey said. “It’s finding employees to do the work.”
When he was coming up through high school in the 1980s, vocational and technical schools – and the careers those schools prepared students for – were looked down on as grimy, low-paying and unsophisticated.
“The jobs had a stigma and weren’t looked on favorably. Many students ended up going to college when they didn’t really want to go,” Tracey said. “College was forced on them. But electricians, plumbers and machinists are killing it now. These are viable careers.”
Tracey ensures his operators and machinists get advanced training on the new computerized devices. The company has added updated technology such as the programmable lathes and milling machines, even though “the old ones produce great quality parts,” he said.
A lot has changed since Tracey started working on the floor. Craftsmen now program new computer numerically controlled machines rather than manually setting them up.
“The staff uses their heads as much as they use their bodies,” he said. “It’s completely different than 25 years ago. It’s not a dirty profession. The new kids have to be computer savvy and have mechanical aptitudes.”
Tracey picks two seniors each year from Davies Career & Technical High School, where he serves on the board of directors, for yearlong internships that double as extended tryouts. Tracey watches closely to see who will mesh with the workplace culture.
“You can tell pretty quick if someone has the aptitude to learn; we look for a willingness to work,” he said. “You’d be surprised at how many that immediately weeds out.”
If he sees potential, he hires them and gives them all the training they will need.
At the high school level, they are introduced to lathe work and milling. But broaching, grinding and gear cutting are skills not normally taught in school.
“Those skills are all taught by the employees here,” he said.
Interns start with small jobs. Tracey has an eye for talent.
“Some are only good enough to be operators, which is great because we really need operators,” he said. “But once in a while, you’ll spot someone who [can] become a talented machinist.”
The work pays well enough so that folks such as Defreitas, the shop foreman, are willing to stay on for their entire careers, Tracey says. Many employees were hired and never left.
“Some guys on the floor are making very good money, and considering they didn’t go to college, they’re way ahead of me when I was in my 20s,” Tracey said. “They’ll have four years of work experience and no college debt.”
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THE RIGHT QUALITY? James Thomas packages nylon spur gears for shipment to a customer.
PBN PHOTO/TRACY JENKINS[/caption]
‘NO CATALOG’
Tracey says the craftsmen work primarily with carbon and alloy steels. They also fashion parts out of bronze, aluminum, stainless steel and, yes, plastic.
“We’ll often put a plastic gear in a gear train,” he said. “Because if something is binding or failing, the plastic will fail first and alert the owner before a bigger problem emerges.”
The gears that Tracey produces are as small as an inch in diameter. Others go up to 36 inches, the shafts as small as half an inch but can run as long as 10 feet.
The pieces are for a wide range of clients and for a wide range of uses.
“Aside from Disney and our military work, most people would never have heard of our customers,” Tracey said. “We also do a lot of replacement parts. Even the parts [we] make for the rides at the Disney parks, they don’t necessarily tell me where they’re going.”
One thing Tracey does know: It is all custom work.
“We make all types of different machine parts,” he said. “There’s no catalog, no product line here.”
