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To whom It May Concern:  

I am the owner of M.K. Tooling Inc. I have known Ed Thompson for over 30 years.  

I have worked on numerous projects where Ed has designed for a variety of customers. These   projects include automated riveting, grinding, assembly, heat treating, wood and metal   processing machines, plus many others.  

The excellent and innovative design of these machines has made them cost effective,  productive, dependable, and easy to maintain.  

I have enjoyed working with Ed throughout the years, and highly recommend his services for any of your design projects.  

Please feel free to contact me for additional information.

Matt Kaartinen   

(503) 253-9072 

I have know Ed for over 15 years and have worked with him for over 10 of those years on various projects that were technically challenged to say the least.   

Ed was presented with a design requirement and then the fun started. The process and equipment (systems) were designed, tested, and released for production with the required results 100% of the time. Documentation to the design and process allowed for a secure proprietary environment.  

The other amazing benefit with Ed and his company was the fact the equipment and process were ready for production on time!  In many cases the process results kept competition from figuring out "How did they do that?"   

I will always recommend Ed and his company without any reservation. Feel free to contact me for any questions.  

Len Lardieri 

(503) 906-4101 

I was employed by Leatherman Tool Group for almost 21 years until my retirement in early 2008. For the major portion of this time, my position was that of VP, Engineering.  

I had responsibility for manufacturing engineering, product design and facilities engineering. During periods of rapid growth, we often found it necessary to contract out some of the special machine design activities of our manufacturing engineering group.   

Early in my Leatherman career, I met Ed Thompson during a search for outside machine design firms. This was the beginning of a long and successful relationship between Leatherman and Manufacturing Systems, Inc.   Ed designed many custom automated production machines for us. He also participated in R&D for improving some of our most complex manufacturing processes. In some cases, he also helped with controls design for equipment developed by Leatherman engineers.

His projects were very professional, innovative, efficient, and cost effective. He was able to take the requirements from our in-house engineers and convert these into successful projects with a minimum amount of in-house coordination time required.  

Ed had an exceptionally good working relationship with both our Leatherman engineers and the outside machine shops who built most of the projects. His follow through and assistance at the time of machine start up was also very good. 

There were even a few times where I was able to briefly step away from normal management responsibilities and work on a project directly with Ed. Those were some of my more enjoyable moments on the job.  

I can honestly say that during my career, Ed’s company was the best engineering services firm that I ever hired and I would highly recommend him for any of the engineering activities listed on his website.  

Please feel free to contact me for any further information.  

Doug Stapp  

(503) 655-7945

I have had the pleasure to work with Ed Thompson for the past few months after I came on board as an operations manager for a local company.  I have found Ed to be a tremendous asset to not only identifying our top quality problems, but helping us get to root cause and corrective action as well as developing test protocol and preliminary functional test fixtures.   

Ed has offered some amazing out of the box investigation techniques that have clearly helped us to communicate problem areas in some of our offshore operations.  As a result of Ed’s work, we are well on our way to implementing design solutions for our top 4 field quality issues. 

Please feel free to contact me for any further information.  

Dan Hill  

(503) 685-6219

In the fall of 2017, Ed Thompson was put in charge of implementing a new, faster production process, which required procuring and deploying new machinery and tooling to accomplish new production targets. 

Over the following year, Ed installed multiple new machines with varying technologies, rebuilt disused hydraulic machinery which was repurposed to the new process, and began trial production runs with the variety of approaches.

Mid-way through the project, it became clear that the initial material testing and resulting specifications given to the machine tool manufacturers, all of which occurred prior to Ed taking over responsibilities for the project, were inadequate.  The forces experienced by machinery during a cycle exceeded all expectations, resulting in a wide range of substantial issues.  Ed took all of the resulting challenges in stride, relying on engineering principles and a deep experience base in machine design to guide the team forward.  Systems were methodically redesigned and rebuilt until the production capability of the overall system met the application requirements.

Now in 2019, the process is moving into high gear and expanding across a dozen production lines. 

Ed was critical to the success of this project and a steady hand even when it stumbled.  He came into the project with little knowledge of the specific systems being used but quickly learned the in and outs of the machinery.  We spoke frequently, diagnosing issues and coming up with new solutions, always with a positive attitude and successful outcome.  I would highly recommend Ed for any engineering position or machine design need.

Mike Josefiak

(603) 889-4101 EXT. 250