By Mike Boyer
The Cincinnati Enquirer

HEBRON - The manufacturer with the unlikely name Cincinnati Lamb is ready to roar.

The renamed and smaller company was created 18 months ago by parent Unova Corp.'s consolidation of Cincinnati Machine, the 120-year-old machine tool builder; Lamb Technicon, a Michigan auto assembly supplier; and Landis, a grinding wheel maker.

It showed off its new advanced technology plant south of Interstate 275 here Tuesday.

The event couldn't have come at a better time. After a five-year slump, there are signs business is picking up, particularly among aerospace companies that are the primary customers for the sophisticated machine tools Cincinnati Lamb designs and builds.

"Things are not hot, but they've gone from cold to warm,'' said Dan Janka, Cincinnati Lamb's senior vice president of sales and marketing.

Besides steady increases in the Federal Reserve's monthly manufacturing index, he said Cincinnati Lamb is seeing more tangible signs.

Its after-market parts business is picking up. That's a sure sign, he said, that manufacturers who idled older machines are starting to put them back into production. New machine orders typically follow several months down the road.

The parts business typically sees a seasonal slowdown in April for the Easter holiday, but "that didn't happen this year,'' Janka said.

Cincinnati Lamb expected about 70 representatives from some of the world's biggest aerospace companies, including Boeing Co., Airbus and their key suppliers, for Tuesday's event. It was pleasantly surprised when 100 showed up for demonstrations of its latest equipment.

"Customers are looking at our technology and are going to buy,'' he said. "I'm confident at least a few orders will come out of this event.''

Today's Cincinnati Lamb is a far cry from the former Cincinnati Machine, which traces its roots to the old Cincinnati Milling Machine Co. and made the name Cincinnati synonymous with machine tools around the world.

The company employs about 300 in Hebron. That's less than half the 750 it employed at its former Oakley manufacturing complex 18 months ago. Thousands worked there during World War II.

But the world, and manufacturing, changed. Where companies once strived to be vertically integrated, producing everything in-house, today's emphasis is on a company's core-competency and specialization.

"Customers don't care whether a ball-screw (for their lathe) was made in Oakley,'' Janka said. But they do want world-class product design, engineering and after-market support, he said.

Cincinnati Lamb thinks its modern 200,000-square-foot plant, in which it has invested more than $5 million, provides that.

The company built a 50,000-square-foot, climate-controlled addition for the assembly of its sophisticated composite tape laying machines for aerospace customers.

Humidity was difficult to control at the old Oakley complex, officials said.

The company also demonstrated the first of its HyperMach ultra-high speed machining centers.

HyperMach was developed over the last decade at the cost of several million dollars as the next-generation technology for aerospace machining.

The 70-foot-long profiler can machine large aircraft structural parts dramatically faster than other machines. The nearly $2 million HyperMach cutting tool can move at up to 4,000 inches per minute, compared to 400 inches in today's machines.

"I've been in this business since I was 18 and I've never seen anything move that fast,'' said Gene Price, 56, president and CEO of Brek Manufacturing Co. The Gardena, Calif., Boeing contractor is taking delivery of the first HyperMach this summer. Brek plans to use the machine to produce large structural sections of the Boeing C-17 Globemaster transport.

It now takes about 30 hours to produce three of the 260-inch long bulkhead sections for the C-17, but Price says the HyperMach should cut that to six or seven hours.

E-mail mboyer@enquirer.com