By: Kim Tingley
Feb 23, 2017
The robots were Joe McGillivray’s idea. The first one arrived at Dynamic Group in Ramsey, Minn., by pickup truck in two cardboard boxes. With a mixture of excitement and trepidation, McGillivray watched as a vendor unpacked two silver tubes, assorted blue-and-gray joints and a touch screen and put them all together. When he was finished 10 minutes later, McGillivray beheld an arm that, had its segments not all been able to swivel 360 degrees, might have belonged to a very large N.B.A. player or a fairly small giant. Its “shoulder” was mounted to a waist-high pedestal on wheels. If it were to hail someone across the room, its “elbow” would reach eye level. Below its “wrist,” which was triple-jointed for extra dexterity, there were sockets for various attachments. McGillivray, not sure yet if he wanted to keep the contraption, stuck a piece of clear tape to the wrist and drew a happy face on it, which made the arm look a bit as if it were putting on a puppet show. He hoped that this would help it look nonthreatening.
McGillivray is the 38-year-old chief executive of Dynamic, a maker of molds for the mass production of small plastic and metal parts, from 3M Scotch-tape dispensers to bullets. The company was founded 40 years ago by his father, Peter, and Peter’s friend Dave Kalina, both tool and die makers, in Kalina’s basement. Machining like theirs is labor-intensive. Even as the business expanded to more than 100 employees in two warehouses in Ramsey — a manufacturing town founded by French traders and settled in the 1850s on the banks of the Mississippi River — many of its customers switched to competitors overseas, induced by improvements in the technologies of developing nations coupled with falling trade barriers. But McGillivray and Kalina found a lucrative niche making molds for the most intricate medical products. Orthodontic braces, for example, use brackets that have unique shapes based on the angles of the teeth to which they will be affixed; the bracket molds, which are injected with powdered steel, must be cut to a degree of precision 40 times thinner than a hair. Thanks largely to the skill of Dynamic’s machinists, the company did more than survive; it prospered. Then came the Great Recession. For the first time, McGillivray and Kalina, once able to offer bonuses, struggled to make payroll. To keep going, they needed to produce more molds or cut costs, or both.