The Framing Fixture: Vimco Engineering, Corona

Subcontractor Gary Vandal started making small parts for motorcycles several years ago in a bid to break away from the declining aerospace business. For MCM, Vimco built a special fixture that holds the tubing for the motorcycle frame in place while it is being welded.

“What all of us who have worked with MCM hope is that they get big enough to be a big client,” he said. “It’s exciting to see small companies pulling together to have a good U.S. product for the market.”

That product would also be good for Vimco, which had 15 employees and $750,000 in annual revenue at its peak in 1987, Vandal said. Since he and his wife, Barbara, started the business in Santa Ana in 1978, Vandal has moved Vimco twice to accommodate growth and, with a move earlier this month to Corona, twice more to accommodate shrinkage. Vimco, now with five employees, grossed $425,000 last year.

“We were all aerospace and defense until about five years ago,” Vandal said. The government-funded jobs that he got as a subcontractor to industry giants like McDonnell Douglas were so lucrative that MCM’s $2,000 project is “the kind of work we would have turned away five years ago,” he admits.

“My son and I ride motorcycles as a hobby,” the 53-year-old Tustin resident said. “So we started to make brake rotors, chain and sprocket covers, brake and foot levers” and other machined parts for racing bikes.

The company was approached to use its computer design system and metal machining skills to make a fixture for fabrication of MCM’s prototype motorcycle frame, but Vandal said his company “will be doing components including axles, rear sprockets” and steering parts when MCM starts production late this summer.