A short biography of Lynn Shackelford and Art Joly
I’m Art Joly and along with my husband of 24 years, Lynn Shackelford, am co-sexton for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Manchester. I trained as a toolmaker at the L.S. Starrett company of Athol, Massachusetts and worked in that position with various employers for the next quarter century. In my last position I was senior toolmaker for P.H. Precision Products Corporation in Pembroke, New Hampshire. As such I was tasked with overseeing the repair and maintenance of the manufacturing machinery, construction of difficult or impossible to obtain replacement parts, and the design and construction of custom production machinery. In addition I worked with team members in the design and implementation of new product manufacturing. My penultimate project was to grind four diameters on a pump shaft and hold plus or minus 4 microns on each diameter with perfect concentricity. I designed the production strategy, bought two centerless grinders and had them overhauled and modified to my specifications. I designed and built two automatic load and unload machines and after consultation with the quality control engineer, his quality department ordered electronic gauging for both machines that I incorporated into the grinder’s control loop. When finished this process met production requirements with only one operator, a person that had never seen a centerless grinding machine before his training with me holding a quality level of 3 defective parts per million or less.
I’m Lynn Shackelford and I am Art’s spouse and the other co-sexton here at UUCM. I was born and raised in southern California ( near Disneyland ) earned a bachelors degree at Orange Coast Community in electronic engineering and worked for many years in the California aerospace industry building and troubleshooting military black boxes. I moved to Massachusetts in the mid 1980s to take care of my ailing mother for six months. Six months turned into six good years with my parents before my mother passed away from heart disease and an undiagnosed cancer. Along the way I met Art and we discovered that we’re kindred souls. I worked with Art at P.H. Precision and held the position of Plant Engineer. Art designs durable, precise and reliable machinery but shouldn’t be left alone with a soldering iron. His idea for color coding wiring is to build one control system in white and the next in red. Together over a nine year period we built 44 pieces of industrial automation. I designed and built with Art’s input the computer control systems and where necessary Art built intrinsically safe pneumatic logic systems for our machines for use in hazardous environments. Two projects that I personally took care of were a waste water treatment plant abandoned by the engineering company that designed it and a metal waste processing plant the owner of the company bought at auction. The water treatment plant was being operated manually with some success. When the treatment plant was not working the metal finishing department quickly became awash in dirty water. My solution was to use dedicated computers to automate the waste water treatment process, adding sensors wherever necessary to give the computer the feedback it needed to make decisions and eliminate as much as possible the need for human intervention. When I finished this multi-year project not only had I reduced if not eliminated the need for emergency intervention, the final products of the process were waste water nearly as clean as the water purchased from the town. The second project turned into a two for the price of one deal. I was give a trailer full of parts to assemble into a machine intended to break up metal turnings from the manufacturing process and separate the oil for re-use. I used my experience with the waste water treatment plant to add an automatic spent oil recycling capability. When I finished one man was able to handle the metal waste output from a 150+ spindle Swiss house, the company had a more compact higher scrap value dry metal powder to sell and the spent oil treatment plant virtually eliminated the need to purchase new cutting oil and the need to pay for the disposal of waste oil.
Individually and together we bring a wealth of knowledge, experience and skill to the UUCM building and congregation. We try to keep the building clean and in order in an unobtrusive way. We feel that if you notice the work we do, we’ve fallen short in our duties.
We are seriously under-employed!
That was then, this is now 15 December 2014, 13 years almost to the day since we last held full time employment.
Lynn is currently recovering from his fourth knee surgery in as many years, and I am really beginning to live with the aftermath of my 1984 motorcycle collision where I broke my neck. Closed head trauma or thanks to the NFL CTE, concussive trauma encephalopathy. I sleep alot. I tire easily and in conversation anything beyond glib answers is taxing. Lynn’s mind is still sharp as a tack but his ability to walk is on hold until the lasted repair is full healed.
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