NUMBER 02 - Haas Automation, Inc.

“You’re wasting time!” booms Senior, flying out of his office in a
clinched-fist fury. Out on the floor, the prodigal sons respond true to form: Paulie
digs in for a fight, while Mikey backs off with a smirk. The Orange County Choppers
shop is, once again, a certifiable war zone. “It ain’t what you do,” bellows Senior’s
almighty voice of clout, “it’s the way that you do it!”
Custom Bikes for All
The well-known management at Orange County
Choppers (OCC) is busy laying the groundwork to make the
company the best-known and most influential bike builder in
the world.
Paul Teutul Senior’s behind-the-scene business
planners, designers, machinists and builders are settling in
to manufacture a new line of standardized production bikes
to support a growing chain of OCC retail dealers. Until now,
each bike has been specifically made to order for each
customer, so the move represents a major shift in the way
everyone at OCC must approach his work. Perhaps no one
faces greater changes than OCC’s machine shop manager
Jim Quinn.
“It’s definitely a challenge,” says Quinn. “In some ways it’s
easier, but in many ways it’s more difficult. Because of the
way we’ve networked our machines, once we’ve made a part
to spec, it’s just a matter of loading the program and we can
duplicate it again without any problems.”
But trying to dedicate machines to manufacturing
production, while building one-off bikes under the pressures
of television deadlines, is no simple matter. “That’s the other
part of it,” says Quinn with a smile. “It never fails. As soon as
I get a machine set up to run production wheels all day, it’s
‘Oops!’ we’ve got to break in and run a special design for one
of the bikes for the show.”
Realizing they suddenly had a lot more irons in the fire,
the OCC gang set out last year to virtually double the size of
the machine shop. Paul Senior and son Mikey, with a full video
crew in tow, dropped in on the one-million-square-foot Haas
Automation factory in Southern California, and humorously
scribed their names on the machines they wanted. Jim Quinn
and many others had thoughtfully coordinated the expansion
and suggested which machines to acquire weeks before the
stars left for the sunny coast; but Senior’s impromptu “This
one’s mine!” scrawl, staged during the factory tour, was much
more entertaining on camera.
Back home, the OCC machine shop began to expand,
spilling over into what had been the warehousing area of the
30,000-square-foot building. This new annex holds a recently
installed Haas Mini Mill, TL-1 Toolroom Lathe and EC-500
horizontal machining center – all tied in with the crew’s everbusy
VF-5/50, VM-3 and VF-2SS vertical machining centers
and SL-20 lathe.
CNC MACHINING | 5