Dahlquist by Fathom: Facility Tour

Transcript - Dahlquist by Fathom: Facility Tour

Hi, I’m Rob Berg. I’m the site lead here at Dahlquist Machine by Fathom. We’re a precision machine shop outside the North Metro Of The Twin Cities. Come on inside and we’ll go take a look.

Here in Ham Lake, we’ve been in business since 1969. We’ve been in this building since ’94 and a part of Fathom since 2020. What we do here and our focus and our niche is going to be on customer service. We keep ourselves 100% on time delivery. We keep ourselves 99 plus percent quality. We do that and we serve industries all across applications for analytics, for diagnostics, for lab devices. We also work into the world of aerospace, defense, class three medical.

When we’re doing that, we also happen to be working in aluminum soft materials. Lots of aluminum, lots of plastic, a little bit of stainless working into there.

Here in Ham Lake, we prefer to go out and hire machinists over operators. I like to know that we’ve got somebody that’s going to be able to focus on a job from cradle to grave. They’re out there. They’re knowing the specs of the parts they’re about to run.

They’re finding their tooling. They’re picking their tooling. They’re building their fixturing. They’re checking their material.

They know their spec.

Customers come to Dulcust for three different things. One being reliability, two being dependability, and third being quality. You know, it’s really what separates us from a lot of other contract manufacturers and a lot of other machine shops, especially here locally. We take a lot of pride in the ethos that we have regarding our interactions with customers and making sure that we are treating them like family. Everybody on our shop floor takes an immense amount of pride in what they do. It’s literally the individual machinist is owning that project.

They build their tools, they know their prints, they do their setup, they’re fully capable of making and measuring their parts.

My name is Josh Lund. I am a sales engineer.

I wear multiple hats. I’ve been here in September. It’ll be twenty six years.

And I have sixteen years of that as a machinist, CNC machinist.

The fact that I was a machinist for four years out on the floor helps me understand how to read the prints, read the tolerancing needed, read the GD and T, read everything that is involved in making the parts to get a good quote to the customer.

This is our quality lab. One of the things that I love about this lab and what we do is we make parts that go out and end up measuring our parts. If we were to tear these machines apart, we would find plenty of the parts that we have made inside each to make here in the contour right here. It’s super powerful as we make sure that we keep ourselves better equipped than any of our customers to be able to know that we’re measuring a part.

That helps make our ISO 9,001 search very easy. That helps us support our aerospace and defense customers and ITAR and know that what we’re making is landing in the right spot the first time every time. What we have for our quality inspectors and quality supervisors, they came up through machining, they came up through the floor. They’re just there to check it.

They’re not quality cops. They’re in there to tell us what we should already know but be that second set of eyes. To ensure that you’re getting a good part the first time every time. That lets our customers rely on us to do what we say we’re going to do.

That helps us support our aerospace and defense customers in ITAR and know that what we’re making is landing in the right spot the first time every time.

We run as a nominal shop here in Ham Lake. That means if we’ve got plus or minus five thou, we’re using plus or minus two. We know that our parts are gonna mate up with other parts made from across the country and across the world. When those parts do meet up with another part, we’re not going to have tolerance stack up problems at our customers.

At Dulquist, our quoting process is different than other shops because we understand how much tooling it’s going to take, any special fixtures it’s going to take.

Some of our customers for have been with twenty years. We’ve been making some of the same parts for those customers for over twenty years, which does go to a lot of the trust that they have in us.

I’m Tim Dishear. I am the shop foreman here at Delquist Machine by Fathom. I’ve been here thirty five years. I do programming. I do troubleshooting. I do job selection. I influence decisions on equipment.

Yeah. My vision for that DMG five axis was turning it into a vending machine. So call up a different part number and hit start, get inspected, and start running.

For multi axis CNC, we’ve got one four plus one YCM, and we’ve got one five axis DMG. This machine’s a rocket ship. We keep a 120 tools in it. We’ve got three pallets sitting on here as a pallet changer to feed it. Eats with a pyramid set on there. We can keep this machine running, almost lights out, get it in there and keep parts continuously running and repeating perfectly.

White glove service here at Fathom means treating our customers the way that we want to be treated and focusing on customer experience. Proactive communication on the front end and flawless execution once we get out to the back door.

My name is Timothy Giles, known as Tim G. I’m the production manager for the lay department. I’ve been in machining for thirty nine years. This is probably the most intense multi axis machine shop I’ve worked for in the last thirty nine years. It’s very impressive.

We know the first tool that any of our customers are going to use to inspect their parts is going be their eyes. Every part that leaves our shop leaves as a piece of jewelry that gets into a box, gets onto the truck, and gets out to our customers.

With the nature of our parts being good small parts, it’s very easy for us to carry a chunk of inventory. That inventory is going to feed good long open blankets with our customers or it’s going to feed into stocking programs. We have over 3,000 SKUs on the shelf here that our customers have trusted us to keep and maintain and come back to. At any point in time, we’ve had up to 200 of those part numbers be on the stocking programs with the customers.

I like what I do. I never wanted to be an office guy. I like getting my hands dirty. I like the troubleshooting aspect.

I like teaching. I want to spread my knowledge, mentor the young people. Machinists are becoming few and far between. So if we can get some young kids in here and teach them the right way to do things, it’s a win.

At Delquis here, we know that our customers have plenty of options. That’s why we keep ourselves at 100% on time delivery. We keep ourselves at 99 plus percent quality and we hand deliver parts. We work tirelessly to meet our commitments so that you can meet yours.