His father, also retired, was the chief operations manager of Gustav Paffenhoff, a machine tool maker in Remscheid.
Six months ago at Trumpf, a machine tool maker in Baden-Württemberg, orders were up, sales were strong and there was a hope that the crisis might bypass the family-owned company that was founded in 1929.
Consider Niizuma, a prototype maker in Kamata, a district in Tokyo that is home to hundreds of tiny parts suppliers, machine tool makers and the like.
"I don't have the impression that we can speak of a credit crunch," said Josef Trischler, director for financial issues at VDMA, the machine tool makers' trade association.
Machine tool makers in Germany made a point early in the financial crisis of threatening banks that they would have long memories if they lost access to credit themselves.
But machine tool makers weren't interested in his design for a custom-made zipper machine, so he made his own.
Solderers, burnishers, polishers, tank-makers, engine fitters, nut and bolt-makers, cycle-makers, core-makers, angle-iron smiths, axle turners, brass tap finishers, machine tool-makers, furnacemen, iron and steel wire drawers, rule-makers.
In 1925 the machine-tool maker Pratt and Whitney provided Rentschler with start-up funds, idle plant space, and a company name to create an aircraft engine manufacturer.
For example, Trumpf, a machine-tool maker in the south German city of Ditzingen, managed to get through the recession without laying off any of its 4,000 German workers.
In his view, they "only improve performance when they are part of creating a culture of employee involvement, with plenty of opportunities for workers to participate in the big decisions facing the firm .One success was Floturn, a troubled machine-tool maker that was bought through an ESOP from its parent, Belcan, in 1988.
And now half a dozen Chinese machine-tool makers are piling in.
