MECHANICAL - Key Persons
FOUNDER, BILL WALLACE Bill Wallace held the position of Manager of Manufacturing at Reaction Motors Division of Thiokol Chemical in Rockaway, NJ from the late 50's to the mid 60's. Thiokol was the prime contractor for solid polymer rocket propellent for the US Space Program. Thiokol acquired Reaction Motors Corporation in the late ‘50's (which had built the liquid propellent rocket engines used in the Viking, Surveyor, and Pioneer Mars missions) in order to gain the expertise in the relatively newer field of liquid fuel rocket propulsion. At Reaction Motors, Bill's division was responsible for the design and manufacture of the HyProx (Hydrogen Peroxide) powered Fuel Pumps that delivered the Liquid Fuel Propellent to the Main Engines on the top secret (at the time) X15 rocket plane. Upon completion of the X15 project in the late 60's, Bill left Reaction Motors to devote full time to his new shop, Mechanical Laboratories which he had opened a year and a half earlier in a 3000 sf building in Dover, NJ. Bill continued to acquire primarily aerospace and defense contracts as well as experimental prototype work for the space program, eventually diversifying into Packaging, Molds, Dies, and General Machining. JIM WALLACE, CURRENT OWNER Jim was the luckiest kid on the block. Growing up with a father working in the Space Program, Jim got to accompany his Dad on Saturdays and during summer vacation to the "Rocket Shop" to hang out with the men designing and building the world's most advanced rocket propulsion systems, and learn about machining and design. Following the changing Defense Contracts, Jim's family moved 7 times, eventually resettling back in northern New Jersey. As a teenager, Jim worked part-time in his Dad's shop learning and mastering all of the machine tools and good machining practices. After High School, Jim partnered up with his Dad, and in the early 90's Mechanical Labs invested in their first CNC equipment. They started with MasterCam Cam software way back at version 3 and have continued the tradition forward. Jim has personally trained many full-time CNC Programmers and operators over the years and has a documented library of over 10,000 nc programs, for everything from simple parts, plates and fixtures, to the most complex Extrusion Blow Molds with 3D parametric surfaces/solids, curved parting lines, and ejector/mask systems. Jim's expertise in C# programming has enabled him to produce numerous custom stand-alone Windows utilities for unusual file conversions, etc. A long-running in-house effort has resulted in the creation of a mature, feature rich, software utility which allows us to completely automate the creation of programs with hundreds of spot drill, drill, ream, counterbore, tap, and chamfer operations (with completely automatic tool selection, spot drill and chamfer depths, feed rates and spindle speeds from material SFM) in a matter of seconds from existing customer Autocad .DXF and Ascii files…operations that can then be directly imported into MasterCam as native operations, and solid-verified for accuracy. One pharmaceutical conveyor shaker screen we made with 300+ reamed and tapped holes was processed in less than 1 second using this utility, creating a program with 10 tools and over 1000 operations! Jim's hobbies include: science, computer programming, guitar, electronics, ice hockey, and volleyball.