Finn Tool and Instrument shutting down

[eKretz]

I was in contact with Finn recently via email and was told by the owner that they will be closing down at the end of this month after 50+ years in business. They are the maker of the Finn Speed-Dex indexers and a few other workholding tools. The owner said that they had a terrible time finding good, skilled workers and that he was ready to retire, so he is just going to shut it down. He told me that most of their work was aerospace; the tooling stuff was mostly just a fill-in thing. Shame. Another one bites the dust.

 

[eKretz]

Also figured I'd add for posterity and any future searchers that if you have any "Path Industries" tools, they are the predecessors to Finn. Here are a couple of mine.

 

[AD Design]

I believe I've worked with several of those (and a few clones) over the years. That's too bad, another one gone for lack of new blood in the trades.

 

[Garwood]

FINN Tool & Instruments, Inc.

FINN Tool & Instruments, Inc. is your partner for high precision parts and assemblies.

www.finntool.com

 

[Ries]

There are still dozens of smaller CNC machine shops in SoCal, and a fair amount of large scale manufacturing. And the place where I took machine shop courses, LA Trade Tech, a community college that is affordable, still has a CNC program. So my guess is that there are employees, they just cost too much. LA is a very expensive place to live and work, and "LA" means an area at least a hundred miles on a side. You can commute 3 hours each way and still be in a neighborhood where the average house is $750,000.
There used to be a lot of small and large machine tool and machinist tooling makers in the LA area, but even when I moved there in about 1984, the herd was thinning. Axelson was gone, Trav-a-Dial moved out of Culver City in 1990, and the last couple of machinist tool supply houses on the Westside had closed by about 90, too.
Holdridge held on longer than most, but they are owned by Travers now, and I dunno if they make anything in LA anymore at all.
Of course, Haas is still in So-Cal, and its the biggest machine tool manufacturer in the US by some metrics.

 

[eKretz]

The gist that I got was that what was available employee-wise was not very high quality; "could not even find a precision machinist who knows what he is doing" - direct quote. There may be more to the story, but that's the short version I got.

FINN Tool & Instruments, Inc.

FINN Tool & Instruments, Inc. is your partner for high precision parts and assemblies.

www.finntool.com

Yup, that's them.

 

[GregSY]

There are plenty of good machinists, and plenty of young and learning machinists. The only problem is they're in places like China and Taiwan and ....