Kearney & Trecker of Milwaukee

Edward J. Kearney, from Iowa, and Theodore Trecker, from Illinois, meet in about 1894 at Frank Kempsmith’s milling-machine works in Milwaukee: Kearney works in the drawing room, and Trecker has come up through the machine shop. On 17 May 1898, shortly after Admiral Dewey’s victory at Manila, they rent a small shop at 271 Lake Street, Milwaukee, and go into business as Kearney & Trecker.

For their first year they build special machinery, much of it to their own designs. The firm starts with twelve employees.

Their experience with milling machines has convinced the partners that the machines suit quantity production. Their first milling machine comes out in 1899, and from then on they give all their attention to milling machines.

The Lake Street rooms are soon outgrown. In 1901 the firm builds a shop just outside Milwaukee, in the town of West Allis. The works grows around it: by 1923 it covers three acres of floor space, and the original building is still part of the plant. In 1942 the firm’s address is 6784 West National Avenue.

The Iron Age describes the firm’s No. 3-B universal miller, a knee-type machine built to take heavy cuts at fast feeds. It runs at constant speed from a single pulley and is geared throughout; the firm has stopped building cone-pulley machines. The knee is cast without a hole through its top, as on the firm’s first machine, and a single overarm is held by braces.

Because the feeds are driven from the constant-speed shaft rather than from the spindle, they are rated in inches per minute instead of inches per turn of the spindle, and a fast feed is available however slowly the spindle turns.

In 1908 the No. 3-B still has a single overarm. By 1919 the firm is building horizontal machines with double overarms, two parallel round bars that carry the support for the outer end of the cutter arbor. They become the mark of a Milwaukee horizontal machine: American Machinist names the double over-arm among the firm’s standard features in 1923, and the No. 2 Model H has them.

The firm’s own literature dates them to 1912: the No. 2 Model H’s sales bulletin speaks of double overarms “since first invented by Kearney & Trecker in 1912”.

In 1920 the business is incorporated again, as successor to the Kearney & Trecker Company. Over the decade the workforce grows from 653 at the end of 1919 to 904 at the end of 1929, as motor vehicle, aircraft, electrical, radio and office-machine makers call for more production tools.

The firm’s own list of the decade’s work names a Production Service division for single-purpose tooling, the first standard milling machines with the motor in the base, power rapid traverse in six directions, and the Milwaukee Simplex and Duplex bed-type machines. Simplex and Duplex machines are in the firm’s lot book by 1929.

On 9 May 1923 E. J. Kearney addresses the National Machine Tool Builders’ Association at White Sulphur Springs as its president, urging the industry to prepare for the next depression. A week later American Machinist marks the firm’s twenty-fifth anniversary: the two partners still work together, and Herman Pufahl, one of the original workmen, is still with the firm.

The depression takes a heavy toll of the industries that make capital goods. Looking back in 1943, Joseph L. Trecker tells Congress that in the seventeen years from 1921 to 1937 the company made a profit in five, and lost about $800,000 on its operations overall.

The firm keeps designing. Its list for the 1930s includes milling with tungsten and tantalum carbide cutters, the solid back column, the centre-bearing spindle, the sponson-type knee, the cross-mounted motor, the sliding-head vertical machine, hydraulic controls, a rotary-head tool and die milling machine, and an astronomical divider that divides a circle into 1,296,000 parts, one second of arc each. E. J. Kearney, the secretary-treasurer, dies in 1934; Theodore Trecker remains president.

At the machine tool exposition in Cleveland the firm shows two series of knee-type machines. Beside the Model K, which a 1937 advertisement calls “the original High-Speed Milling Machine”, it introduces the Model H: two manufacturing sizes, No. 0 and No. 1, and the No. 2H light machine in plain, universal and vertical forms, with a 3 hp motor, sixteen speeds and sixteen feeds.

The lot book, which records when the last machine of each production lot shipped, shows the first lots of the new machines completed that summer: fifteen No. 1-H manufacturing machines in July, twelve 3K horizontals of the “1935 Model” in August and No. 2K verticals in September. The first lot of No. 2H horizontals follows in April 1936. By January 1937 Model H machines are offered as plains, universals and sliding-head verticals, “the same as the Model K”.

Joseph B. Armitage, who is the firm’s chief engineer by 1940, files two patents in June 1936. US 2,182,421 describes a vertical knee-type machine with a sliding head; US 2,215,684, filed two days later, is its horizontal companion, with double overarms.

Together they set out the drive the Model H uses: a motor across the column base driving through multiple belts to a clutch pulley with a starting clutch and brake, a speed box giving sixteen speeds, a take-off for feed and rapid traverse, and a knee feed box giving sixteen feeds from one crank and one dial. The assemblies match the No. 2 Model H’s parts manual one by one, often under the same names.

In June the first lot of five 2D rotary-head milling machines is completed. Its rotating head lets a toolmaker mill in metal the lines and arcs a draughtsman draws with straight-edge and compass. In October American Machinist uses the name No. 2HL for the 3 hp light Model H, and in November it reports two larger sizes, the 3H with a 7½ hp motor and the 4H with a 10 hp motor.

The 5 hp No. 2 Model H, the machine this exhibit shows in detail, is on sale by 1940. Its sales bulletin presents it as a new size between the light machines and the heavy-duty ones, built on the same principles as the larger Model K.

To keep the price down, the bulletin says, the machine goes without a single-lever speed control, a pilot wheel for the overarms and duplicate feed controls at the rear. The firm’s 1940 anniversary book pictures a 2H universal, and a dealer later offers a 2H plain of 1940.

The firm marks its forty-second year with a book, Climaxing 42 Years, and 2,431 employees. Theodore Trecker is president; Joseph L. Trecker is vice-president, and Francis J. Trecker, a founder’s son, is assistant chief engineer under Joseph B. Armitage. More than a hundred apprentices are in training, and new 5H heavy-duty machines are announced for the year.

Production lots grow. In the 1930s the lot book records machines a dozen or a few dozen at a time; in 1940 it records 2H horizontals forty at a time and, in July, two lots of eighty 2K–3H horizontals.

The plant grows to match. Ground is broken on 20 December 1939 for a 70,000 sq ft addition to the 220,000 sq ft works, and the first machine tool is running in it 44 days later. A further 20,000 sq ft follows; by November 1941 about 100,000 sq ft has been added since the start of 1940. In February 1942 the firm decides on a defence plant addition, whose plans Francis J. Trecker administers.

Inside, the departments are rearranged. The old plant was grouped by type of machine tool; the new one groups the machines that make each part, so that more than forty operations on the knee casting are done in the knee department. Among the new workers, 579 semi-skilled and unskilled workers learn the operations beside veteran employees.

Automotive Industries describes Continental Motors’ Detroit plant, rebuilt to make R975 radial engines for military tanks. Its factory routings name Kearney & Trecker machines for milling cylinder heads and crankcases, several of them No. 2-H machines.

The same month Alfred T. Palmer photographs a Milwaukee Model K vertical machining axle brackets for a 37 mm anti-aircraft gun carriage at Aetna in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania.

Edward Gruber photographs a Brooklyn plant that has turned from paper-making machinery to aircraft wing parts. At a Milwaukee Model H sliding-head vertical, an operator mills aluminium stub wing blocks.

The War Production Board’s order L-108 limits how new machine tools may be finished: one coat of primer or sealer, no filler, no more than two coats of paint, and no colour but “old machine tool gray” for the last coat.

A surviving No. 2 Model H plain carries the order on its column, cast in the iron where other machines read MILWAUKEE: WAR FINISH / AS DIRECTED BY / W.P.B. ORDER No. L-108.

In June 1944 General Motors’ master mechanics tell American Machinist that the emergency finish is not satisfactory and that they want the pre-war finish back after the war.

In August 1942 The Iron Age shows three Kearney & Trecker employees, one in bib overalls, with the car streamers the corporation supplies for its 10 per cent war bond drive: “I’m a 10% war bond man”.

The firm’s labour-management committee puts up posters against absenteeism. One, photographed for the Office of War Information, reads “Mother loses 3 sons at Pearl Harbor / Dedicated to each of you / 115 men absent after payday!”. Twelve posters lettered with the firm’s name survive in the government’s collections: reminders to return tools to the crib, appeals to buy bonds and keep producing, and a memorial for Decoration Day 1942. Two use racist caricatures of Japanese people, and two more caricature the Axis leaders.

With new machines slow to come, the firm advertises an Emergency Production Service Department. Its August 1942 advertisement shows a plain Milwaukee fitted with a universal milling attachment, a dividing head and a low lead attachment, cutting a spiral clearance on a cutter blank, for less than half the price of a new machine.

The October advertisement tells of a large manufacturer who had to mill tank parts vertically while all his vertical machines were busy; Universal Milwaukee Milling Attachments turned his plain machines into vertical ones.

On 15 August 1942 Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson tells Theodore Trecker that the Army-Navy Production Award has been granted to the company and its employees. It is presented at the factory on 9 September: Rear Admiral Charles W. Fisher gives the pins and Brigadier General William H. Harrison the flag, with Governor Julius P. Heil present, and the ceremony is broadcast over WEMP.

The workforce has nearly doubled since 1940. Across the country the award went to 4,283 facilities, and in the Milwaukee area to 68 companies.

The House Committee on Naval Affairs, investigating the progress of the war effort, hears Joseph L. Trecker, the firm’s executive vice-president and a director of the National Machine Tool Builders’ Association. His written statement calls Kearney & Trecker one of the three largest makers of milling machines in the United States, which together supply a major proportion of them.

He expects the industry’s sales to fall, citing the association’s estimates: from $1.3 billion in 1942 to $1.0 billion in 1943.

The firm machines aircraft parts itself. American Machinist describes how it slots forged SAE 4340 steel wing hinges, in four sizes, for carrier-based aircraft. Carbide-tipped cutters have replaced high-speed steel ones and saved 95 per cent of the machining time, and an air-operated fixture has cut the time to load each piece.

A photographer at the NACA’s Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio, records its machine shop from end to end. Along the wire-mesh tool crib stand two Milwaukee Model H horizontal machines, one behind the other, in a row of knee-type millers with a Cincinnati.

The same photographs show the rest of the shop: rows of toolmakers’ benches, fluorescent lights under the roof trusses, a notice board with an accident-record chart, and a flag hung from a girder.

The firm advertises 99 models, from 3 to 50 hp. The No. 2 Model H is offered as a plain, universal or vertical machine, and now also with automatic cycle in plain and vertical forms.

Theodore Trecker, who has run the company since 1898, is succeeded in July 1947 by Francis J. Trecker. A Cornell engineer who had worked for Pratt & Whitney Aircraft and Pratt & Whitney Machine Tool, and for two years on defence subcontracting in Washington, he moves all controls research to the main plant and raises spending on research and development.

According to Francis Trecker’s Hall of Fame biography, the firm begins producing numerically controlled profilers and skin mills for aircraft work in 1950. In 1953 it joins Hughes Tool, under the Aircraft Industries Association, to develop a numerically controlled transfer machine, the firm’s engineering development No. 74.

In July 1957 American Machinist counts 105 large machine tools with continuous-path numerical control, bought by the Air Force for aircraft plants and built by four firms: Cincinnati Milling Machine, Giddings & Lewis, Kearney & Trecker and Morey. Bendix supplies the controls for the Kearney & Trecker machines.

The firm announces three new knee-type machines, the No. 1 CH, No. 2 CHL and No. 2 CH, stressing “the new larger working ranges”. The 5 hp No. 2 CH has a 50 by 12 in. table, a No. 50 spindle taper as standard and sixteen speeds from 25 to 1,500 r.p.m.; its vertical version has Mono-Lever table control and automatic cycle.

The surviving founder dies. Born in 1868 in Peru, Illinois, to parents who had come from Germany, he had run the company from 1898 until 1947; he is elected to the Machine Tool Hall of Fame in 1988. A local history gives the firm 2,250 workers on a 95-acre site at his death.

Hughes has contracted with the firm for a line of three machines with Hughes controls and a tool changer. Wallace E. Brainard, a self-taught engineer who had done electro-hydraulic and tracer-control work at Vultee, Northrop and Hughes, moves with the contract to Kearney & Trecker as Director of Technical Operations. When the Hughes control proves unsatisfactory and the contract ends, he leads a team that designs one machine combining the tool changer with a General Electric numerical control.

On 27 June 1958 Brainard and four colleagues file a patent for a machine tool that changes its own cutting tools. In October the firm unveils the Milwaukee-Matic at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers’ machine tool conference in Hartford, Connecticut. It holds about thirty tools in a circular magazine, changes them automatically, and mills, drills, reams, taps and bores on one machine.

It goes on sale in December. The Model II works from General Electric paper-tape control, with travels of 24, 21 and 16 in. on its three axes and an indexing table to turn the work. Later accounts call it the first machining centre.

The first Model IIs are built in 1958 at the firm’s Highway 100 plant, in lot 8680, entered in the lot book as “ED #74 Servo Control Milling”. The first is shown to employees in December 1958. The second ships in January 1959 to General Electric’s control division at Waynesboro, Virginia, as a test machine for its controls; GE’s president comes to Milwaukee to accept it.

That year machines go to GE at Schenectady, to United Nuclear for machining fuel elements, to CVA in England, to Colt Industries, and to Raytheon, where one makes gimbal blocks for Hawk and Sparrow missiles. In January 1959 an advertisement calls the machine “a flexible automated machining center”; just over a year after its launch the firm reports 55 orders and 30 deliveries.

Kearney & Trecker and the Cross Company of Fraser, Michigan, a builder of transfer machines, agree on 2 October 1978 to come together under a holding company, Cross & Trecker Corporation; both become its subsidiaries on 13 February 1979. In September 1979 the Department of Justice sues under the Clayton Act to undo the merger, citing the markets for machining centres and head changers.

Francis J. Trecker, who had led the firm into numerical control, dies in 1987. That year Kearney & Trecker’s president, William J. Fife Jr., moves to Giddings & Lewis of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. On 31 October 1991 Giddings & Lewis completes its purchase of Cross & Trecker and becomes the largest machine-tool maker in the United States.

Kearney & Trecker closes in 1993, after Japanese and German competition had worn away its sales of milling machines through the 1980s.