Leech and Garner gold mill consulting

Tom's first major industrial consulting engagement, 1978. $5,000/year retainer at the time of his $20,000 MIT salary. Required by his bank for the Belmont house purchase ($85K then, >$1M now). Leach and Garner (Attleboro MA, founded 1899) ran two continuous casters for two-inch-diameter karat gold round when most steel mills had none.

I started on the faculty in 1976; in 1978 I bought a house. I still live in Belmont. At that time it was three bedrooms and one and a half baths; it's now eight bedrooms and four and a half baths. Same six-tenths-acre plot — but I had seven children. My wife thought all the children should have their own bedroom, so we added on. To buy that house I had gotten a consulting job with a company down in Attleboro, Massachusetts called Leach and Garner. They put me on a $5,000-a-year retainer. My salary as a faculty member at that time was probably about $20,000 a year, so this was a big deal. The bank made me get a letter from Mr. Leach and Mr. Garner saying I had a retainer of $5,000 a year, because if I'm making $20,000, I couldn't afford an $85,000 house. About two years ago I found that letter in my old files. Now that house is worth over a million dollars. People say, oh, you bought a house for $85,000 in Belmont. Well, yeah, but the year before it sold for 70.

$10M of gold in a single small pot during a 1980 cast that turned out to be set up just for Tom's benefit. Three-day-vs-four-day throughput is the difference between substantial profit and loss because of the interest carry on the gold inventory. Findings (earring posts, watchband clasps) sold to jewelry suppliers including Schwank. Consulting relationship ran into early 1990s, ended when a Canadian gold-foundry acquisition (forced on Leach and Garner by a supplier loan default) lost $10M to internal theft.

One time I was helping them with a casting problem. He said, come down, we're having problems, we're going to make a cast. This was around 1980. I go down there and find out the cast was just for me. And there was $10 million in the pot. Just a little pot. Ten million dollars in there. Everything in processing of gold is the time value of money — the interest charges on the gold. If you can get it through that plant in three days, from bullion to shipped product, you make a lot more money than if you do it in four days. They had everything: start with the bullion, alloy it, cast it, roll it, shape it, form it, make what they call findings — the little earring posts and clasps for watchbands. They made all those little components and sold them to the jewelry people — Schwank and other jewelry suppliers. The mill providing all the raw materials was Leach and Garner.

Reference to their "fancy wire" division — progressive-die shaped-wire production sliced "like a piece of bologna" to make eyeglass hinges at sub-penny cost. Establishes the competing process the additive method has to beat.

Plus, how do we make these hinges today? If you go down to Attleboro, Massachusetts, there's a company called Leach & Garner, which is the reason Attleboro is the gold capital of the world. They have what they call a fancy wire division. Instead of making round brass or gold-filled wires — brass with gold on the outside — they have a room the size of this one that has all these dies. Instead of a round wire, they have all kinds of shapes. If you put a hole in that, you've got a big long wire, but you basically slice it like a piece of bologna in a shear machine, and you've got one of your hinges. In fact if you do it right, you get two hinges, because you put two of them, one on each side. Then you just use the screw, and screws are cheap. A hinge like that for your eyeglasses, probably less than a penny.

Attleboro, MA gold-alloy mill founded 1899; supplier to surrounding jewelry manufacturers (Swank etc.). Tom uses two theft stories: gold rings thrown into the stream behind the plant (solution: purchase the mineral rights to prosecute), and the fired-employee's-girlfriend flushing rings down the toilet to spite the company.

I used to work for a gold company down south of here in Attleboro, where they make most of the jewelry and gold jewelry in the United States. I used to get some really good stories about people trying to steal gold. The company I was working for was called Leach and Garner. They had built a plant in 1899. All the other jewelry manufacturers built up around there because Leach and Garner was the mill. They would take gold bullion and melt it. They had two continuous casters for making gold alloys, and they would continuously cast strips of the whole, and then they would make it into everything you could think of: tubes, sheet, foil, bar, wire. They sold it to the jewelry people, who'd take the wire and make it into eyeglass flex frames or whatever.