St Louis has built military aircraft since the 1940s, and a deep supply base grew up around the work. We write and prove out programs at your machine, adding programming capacity when new part numbers arrive faster than your team can keep up.
McDonnell Aircraft was founded in St Louis in 1939, and the region has built aircraft and spacecraft ever since: the Phantom, the Mercury and Gemini capsules, and generations of fighters under the McDonnell Douglas name and after it. More than eighty years later, the fighter lines are still here.
All of that work built a supply base around it: machine shops, fabricators, special processors and assemblers in North County around the airport, out through St Charles County, south through Fenton, and west to Washington, still turning out flight hardware today.
And the work is growing again. A new-generation fighter program and nearly $2 billion in new aircraft production facilities under construction mean new part numbers flowing down to the shops that support them, on top of the production those shops already run. The CMM Programmer works on both sides of that line.
When a new program arrives, the CMM is where it shows first. Every new part number needs a program written, proven out, and released before parts can ship, and the same machine and the same programmer still answer for everything already in production.
That is where we fit. We write and prove out the new programs at your machine while your own people keep current production measuring, or we take over the production side so your programmer can focus on the new work. Either way, the backlog moves without pulling anyone off the work that is shipping today.
When the new parts settle into production, we can train your team on the programs we wrote, on your version of PC-DMIS, so the knowledge stays in your building.
The work spreads across the region: the aerospace corridor around the airport through Hazelwood, Bridgeton and Earth City, fast-growing St Charles County from St Charles through St Peters and O'Fallon, South County around Fenton, the machining base inside the city itself, and west out to Washington. Wherever the CMM is, that is where we do the work.
When two or three facilities in the area have work waiting, one visit can cover them all, with the travel expenses split between them. We work with you to make the most sense of your workload, schedule, and budget.
New part programs written and proven out at the machine
An experienced contract programmer on your floor when the need arises, hourly or daily
First article dimensional reports built to satisfy your customer's quality requirements
Custom training on your parts, your probing, and your version
$125 per hour and $950 per day, the same rates as everywhere else in the country.
Yes, a contract CMM programmer is one of the fastest ways to add capacity during an aerospace program ramp-up, because every new part number needs a program written and proven out before it can ship, and an experienced programmer on site can carry that new work while your own team keeps current production measuring.
We work on your equipment and inside your quality system, and every program we write stays with you, documented so your team can run and maintain it after we leave.
Scheduling in St Louis usually runs one to two weeks out for a planned multi-day visit, and short-notice visits are often realistic here, so a program that has to be running by the end of the week is worth a call before anyone assumes it has to wait.
Either way, we arrange travel around your dates the very best we can.
On-site programming coverage around St Louis runs across the region: the aerospace corridor around the airport through Hazelwood, Bridgeton and Earth City, St Charles County, South County around Fenton, the machining base inside the city, and west out to Washington, with everything close enough to reach inside a single engagement.
The Metro East communities across the river in Illinois are in reach the same way, so if the machine is anywhere in Greater St Louis, it's close enough.
Validation of a new CMM program for production inspection is always your decision and your record, because you own the quality system that defines what evidence is sufficient to release a program into regulated production use, and that judgment cannot be delegated to an outside programmer.
We prove out programs at the machine, and we can support first article runs, correlation checks and repeatability studies during the visit. But the final judgment that the program is fit to run production stays where your quality system puts it.
Tell us about the machine, the parts, and the timeline. We will do our very best to plan around your dates, and it costs nothing to talk through it first. When a quote is the next step, a follow-up comes back with timing and a straightforward number.
