Inside the GMT Manufacturing Co., a machine shop on West Street in Plantsville, a man wanders aisles of World War II-era equipment looking for new ways to make old machine tools useful.
That man is Guy Matthew Touma, and he is Southington’s answer to Rube Goldberg, the Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist most remembered for creating cartoons that depicted overly complex ways of performing the simplest tasks. Goldberg’s elaborate inventions were the influence, for instance, for the creations employed by Wile E. Coyote designed to catch the Road Runner.
Touma is similar but different. He looks for the most inexpensive way to do something efficiently. It’s a quest that has taken him to auctions, basements and closets to find cheap parts he could jury-rig to make his old machining equipment work better and faster than modern, computer-controlled machines. It’s a race that, at least for the jobs he does, Touma usually wins.
In the parlance of the machining world, GMT performs what’s called secondary work — grinding, cutting or making other types of changes to parts made by some other manufacturers. GMT doesn’t make screws for instance, but it can make the cuts in a screw for a screwdriver to fill.
That’s not an unusual job — there are hundreds of machine shops in the area that have the same specialty. What makes GMT so special is the ways in which Touma uses unusual devices to make his machines work faster.
New Use For Old Parts
In one machine in the corner, Touma needed a way to make screws fall down a chute so that they could be cut in a milling machine. His solution: Take a 20-year-old vibrating back massager and stick it to the side of the chute. It worked perfectly; the screws fall into the machine, one by one.
Right next to that one sits a 1915 milling machine, the kind that used to be attached to a motor on the ceiling. To work it, Touma found an old washing machine motor and attached it. It doubles as a pump that spits oil onto parts that are being ground down.
Most of the machines up and down his shop are fitted with old air cylinders and switches that allow the operators to grip and cut metal quickly, drastically lowering the time it takes to spit out a screw or cut a part.
“This one machine I got for free, although it cost me $700 to fix it up,” said Touma of a 20-year-old milling machine. “The new one would have cost $15,000. I have been using this for seven years. It’s cheaper and smarter my way.”
The Rube Goldberg way. That’s what his father, George Michael Touma, the namesake of the business, called it. George, now in his 80s, is an inventive, resourceful man whose pluck with making add-ons to machines stuck with his young son who spent his formative years on the machine shop floor.
A testament to George’s pluck hangs on the wall — a clipping from the Sept. 23, 1966 Meriden Journal with a headline that reads “$65, Guts and Sheer Nerve Put GMT On Road to Business Success.” It tells about how a resourceful man took a Rube Goldberg approach to building his business.
Now, as GMT finishes its 60th year in business, it still runs some of the same old machines that it used when it opened. And they work well.
You’ll find GMT-machined parts in many places — on fishing reels made by Penn, on mountain biking equipment sold by Cannondale, and even on the electrical outlet covers found on the floors at most department stores.
“I am not saying newer, computerized machines aren’t any good,” Touma said. “We’re just much more competitive without them. People don’t understand it, but it would be unnecessary overhead and time consuming. We make our own machines. And the mad scientist approach is what works.”
Kenneth J. St. Onge is a freelance writer. Reach him at kenstonge.com
