Ardel Engineering Blog

One need only look at the past several decades to see that while the United States remains one of the world’s biggest manufacturing powerhouses, we’ve fallen behind a fair bit.

Thirty years ago, one by one, manufacturers who dealt in bulk production of things like electronics and toys made the critical decision to reconfigure their operations in places like China’s Pearl River Delta, Singapore, the Philippines, or Mexico. As a result, the total percentage of our workforce that is employed directly or in a field related to manufacturing has declined steadily since the late 70s, to a point where it now constitutes roughly 9% of American workers. Compare this statistic to the boomtown heydays of the early 1950s when around 30% of our workforce was engaged in manufacturing, and you can see the great disparity. Cheaper workers, more permissive labor laws, and certain aspects of free trade agreements have all contributed to a culture and atmosphere where it is deemed “smart” – and justifiably so – for a large company to migrate its manufacturing capacities overseas. Few companies have used the productivity of foreign workforces more brilliantly than California’s Silicon Valley technology companies, where outsourcing of printed circuit boards and silicon chips has gone on since at least the 1980s.

For the large part, we who were born in North America grew up in an instant age.

We had refrigerators, microwaves, toasters, dishwashers, and washing machines that made the daily schlep of food storage, cooking, cleaning, and grooming into something less than a footnote in our collective day. And as our country came online throughout the 90s and the 00s, we found ourselves living in a world where everything – information, consumer products, skills, career opportunities, professional consultation, friendship, even soul mates – were suddenly ours for the Google-searching. In a few brief years, the work of Tim Berners-Lee and his like grew to encompass the entire planet. People once marveled that a supersonic Concorde passenger jet could deliver travelers from Charles De Gaulle Airport to JFK Airport in a matter of a few hours. Today, these same people can connect with friends, loved ones, and business associates across the globe in the matter of just a few, wireless seconds.

Few would take exception to the fact that the United States Air Force (USAF) is – collectively – the most powerful aerial combat instrument in the world.

Time and again in recent decades, American air supremacy has won the day in conflicts such as the First and Second Gulf Wars, as well as in Kosovo and Afghanistan. The names of America’s fighters, bombers, attack, recon, electronic detection, and transport aircraft are the stuff of late 20th and early 21st century legend: F-15s, F-16s, F-18s, C-5s, C-130s, A-10s, B-1s, B-2s, and B-52s have struck fear in the hearts of America’s enemies and have been “welcome news” indeed for many an American army or marine grunt pinned down by enemy gunfire in cities, villages, plains, and crevices across the Middle East and beyond.

Ardel has a long history of providing for America’s defense.

In the early 1980s, when then-President Ronald Reagan called for a “600 ship navy” to counteract the menace of a steadily growing Soviet fleet of submarines and maritime bombers – we put our shoulders to the wheel to meet that challenge. The American Navy saw its largest incarnation since the end of the Second World War, and was indisputably the most powerful fleet that ever sailed an ocean. As the Cold War ended and the so-called Pax Americana began, we thought the time had come to begin shifting our efforts into other advanced fields of technology, areas like computers, advanced medicine, and space-borne telecommunications systems.

Ardel Engineering got its start as the brainchild of two General Mills engineers, Del Jensen and Loren Meredith.

In their daily goings-about at General Mills, Del and Loren observed – and astutely so – that the machinery they operated at the company’s plants could be built from higher-quality components. After some negotiations with the parent company, they began fabricating machined parts for General Mills in 1967. Other commercial customers followed in swift succession. In the 1980s, with the massive build-up of the United States Navy to counter the perceived threat of the Soviet Red Banner Fleet, Ardel became a critical provider of high-grade components for U.S. naval warships. Our work on behalf of the U.S. Navy played its fair share in helping America out-engineer and outspend the Kremlin in terms of defense, and allowed for the Cold War to finally – and peacefully – end.

Being an ISO-certified, long-proven manufacturer of components for aerospace, we at Ardel wanted to inform our blog readers on one of the more recent trends in aircraft design.

We’re not talking about the fact you have to pay for your “complimentary” audio headset on most flights these days. We’re talking about reducing the overall tonnage of airplanes in order for them to attain greater mechanical performance and efficiency.

Before there was geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (or GD&T for short), manufacturers relied almost entirely upon linear dimensioning to achieve standardization of parts.

Linear dimensioning is simply the practice of measuring a given distance to the most exact possible degree of accuracy. It was during the Second World War that GD&T was first discovered and applied. A British inspector of submarine torpedo parts, a man named Stanley Parker, discovered that certain components which wouldn’t normally seem qualified for military specifications were actually fit to be used in torpedoes. Instead of throwing the parts away as would normally be done, Parker realized that if the components were mated together with other parts to a reasonable degree of tolerance, then they still met the requirements of military specifications, and were good to go. Naturally, this saved Parker time and effort in the fast-paced business of providing for the British Royal Navy.

Since our company’s inception, we’ve made it a priority to round out our capabilities so we can perform even better for the industries we serve.

To that effort, we’ve purchased a formidable array of top-of-the-line CNC machinery equipment for all types of applications. CNC horizontal mills, CNC vertical mills, CNC turning/Swiss screw machines, high-performance saws, wire EDM machines, and state-of-the-art computerized design and logistical technology are all part of our arsenal. 

As our machinery numbers have gone up, so have our quality control and inspection processes , all of which contributed to our receiving an ISO 9001 certification not so long ago.

You might think, what with our website and our long-running social media presence, that our company has some extensive background in the advertising industry. Well, if you’d thought that, you’d be correct. While we try simply to report the facts and figures in regards to our own company – and simply let our capabilities do most of the real “talking” – we’ve done some serious manufacturing work on behalf of… well, advertising companies. In fact, one of the most prominent agencies in the Twin Cities advertising world habitually contracts us to build the framework for in-store fixtures and drive-thru banner stands.

First off, we’d like to thank those who have thus far been taking the time to read our blog.

It’s been a good many months since our first entries about Swiss screws and aerospace engineering, and we’re glad that many of you seem to be taking the time to examine what’s happening at our company beyond simply placing an order. Sometimes it really is a thought that counts, especially when that thought proves to be of practical value to someone out there in Cyberland. We certainly hope what we’re writing has been useful for our viewers – both clients and casual readers alike.