Rivals Help Resurrect Firm From Ashes of Ruinous Fire

The guests of honor Friday at ceremonies marking the reopening of a recently burned-out Chatsworth manufacturing plant were an unlikely group: its competitors.

Owners and employees of the Dunlap & Abbott Co. staged a party in their new $11-million machine shop to thank competing companies and others who helped them stay in business after a flash fire gutted the plant nine months ago.

Eighty workers ran for their lives as a fireball fueled by oil mist rolled through the football-field-size machine shop. Nine persons were burned and the fire destroyed the company’s collection of computerized lathes and drills.

Workers combing the ashes discovered that the fire ruined precision parts they manufactured for missiles, fighter planes and other defense products.

Surprise Help

But the 25-year-old company got a surprise reprieve from permanent ruin.

Without prompting, rival San Fernando Valley manufacturing firms, which in the past had bid against Dunlap & Abbott for lucrative government contracts, lent machinery and temporary shop space to the company. Others offered interim jobs for the displaced workers.

After that, purchasing agents from aerospace companies that bought the firm’s products eased deadlines for the Chatsworth plant to deliver goods.

“They kept us alive,” company president Ted McCarthy, 42, said Friday as he cut a ribbon at the rebuilt plant’s rear shipping door.

Equipment Sold for Scrap

Within days of the fire, Dunlap & Abbott workers moved borrowed lathe and milling machinery into an empty warehouse behind their gutted plant. Within a month, they had resumed the manufacture of helicopter and missile parts and other products that earn the company $8.5 million a year.

McCarthy and company vice president Bill Abbott, 45, sold the scorched hulks of what had been sophisticated computerized machine centers to a scrap dealer for $4,675. The equipment had cost more than $7 million, they said.

“We found out that we were under-insured by about 50%,” McCarthy said. “We wanted to buy the same kind of American-made equipment again since our people were familiar with it. But we ended up going with Japanese equipment that is about 30% cheaper.”

For Friday’s celebration, the grateful Mitsui Machine Tool Sales Co., which sold them the equipment, sent 20 cases of imported Japanese beer.

Competitor Jack Voshell, whose Lansair Corp. in Van Nuys has frequently bid against Dunlap & Abbott, said he decided to lend his competitor a pair of $200,000 machining centers because he “felt sorry” for the company.

“I have a lot of respect for them,” Voshell said. “I’d hope somebody would do the same thing for me if something like that happened to me. They had a lot of damn guts. The fact that they’ve converted to an entirely new machine is also very bold. This is a very precise business.”

Stan Roche, purchasing manager of HR Textron in Pacoima, said his company created a new night shift at its plant to provide jobs for a dozen of the Chatsworth workers while the plant was being rebuilt.

“We had a half-dozen different contracts for fighter plane parts going at the time with Dunlap & Abbott and we needed the parts,” Roche said. “We had the machinery. Besides, they were darn nice people.”

Ralph K. Patton, senior purchasing agent for Litton Guidance & Control Systems in Woodland Hills, said he rushed to Chatsworth while the June 4 fire was still burning. Later he agreed to modify his contracts with the firm during the rebuilding process.

To Make ‘Lives Easier’

“I’d done business with them for 15 years,” Patton said. “I stood out there and watched the place burn and cried along with them for the jobs we all thought they’d lost and for the $100,000 worth of my parts that were being burned up in there.”

Friday’s visitor tours of the rebuilt shop at 20130 Sunburst St. will be repeated this afternoon for the families of Dunlap & Abbott’s 105 employees.

“One thing you can say about the fire,” manufacturing director Donn Volkmann said. “After 25 years, it gave us the chance to have the equipment laid out in a logical, efficient fashion. The equipment is new to us but it’s going to make our lives easier.”

Volkmann and other workers said the fire led to 70-hour work weeks during the seven-month rebuilding effort.

“The conditions were horrid. People could have left us and worked in better conditions for more money without coming in Saturday after Saturday,” he said. “But they didn’t.”

McCarthy said some of the 6-ton machines were moved and re-calibrated three times after the fire. The sophisticated lathes and mills can do precision grinding and drilling to within five 10-thousandths of an inch, he said.

“When every piece of equipment is new, you don’t know anything about anything. Our people now have confidence in themselves like they’ve never had before,” he said.