About APM

The story

Al spent years running the machine shop at the local utility before he went out on his own in 1997, starting APM — Al's Precision Machining — in the family garage in Pembroke. The work outgrew the garage, and in 2003 the shop moved to its current building on Hooksett Road. Al's wife has run the office side of the business from the beginning.

Brendan, Al's son, has worked in the shop formally since 2010 and has run it since 2014 — as a machinist, an engineer, the person who quotes the job and the person who answers the phone when a machine is down. That is still how it works: the person you talk to about your part is the person who understands how it will be made.

What we do

APM is a full-service shop at 1356 Hooksett Road in Hooksett, New Hampshire. Fifteen machine tools — eight mills including two five-axis, seven lathes including a live-tooled sub-spindle turning center — plus a waterjet, a fiber laser and a welding and brazing bench. A job that would normally move between three or four vendors stays in one building from raw stock to marked, finished part, and what does have to go out for heat treat, plating or EDM goes to vendors we have used for years and comes back through our inspection.

The work runs from quantity-of-one prototypes and emergency repairs through repeat production, and the balance is shifting toward production on purpose. The accounts we are building for are the ones that bring us a part in the 100-to-1,000 range, repeating for years, on a blanket order we run ahead of and stock. Here is how that works. The one-off and the broken part with no drawing still get made — the same people do both, and the prototype habits are why the production parts come out right.

The shop

On certifications

We are not ISO 9001, AS9100 or ITAR registered, and we would rather say so here than have you find out on the phone. If your work requires a certified quality system, we are not the right shop for that job. If it requires parts to print, on time, with the paperwork you ask for, we are — and we have been doing exactly that for the same customers for a long time.

Where we work

Most of our customers are within an hour of the shop — Manchester, Concord, Nashua, the Seacoast and over the line into northern Massachusetts. We ship further for repeat work. Small jobs for accounts we know can often go in days; typical jobs run four to eight weeks depending on load; large programs are planned over months.