By John Howell

Because my older son and Gary Blair’s daughter have been married to each other for most of

their lives, it goes without saying that I’ve known him a long time.

So I didn’t consider it unusual — back in 2000 after an orthopedic surgeon had bridged a

fracture in my wrist with a small metal piece which was inserted under the skin, and then

removed once the bone healed — that my son said that his father-in-law would be interested in

seeing them.

The surgeon had given them to me as souvenirs, the metal piece and screws which had been

removed after the bone had knitted.

As unremarkable as the small piece of polished metal and screws appeared to me, Blair seemed

totally fascinated once he saw them.

He turned the small pieces in his hands, this way and that, holding them in the light and

examining the edges over and over, making a few comments — compliments about the

workmanship if I remember correctly.

Blair is a — machinist? a tool and die maker? — somehow I’ve never found a label that exactly

fit him. I’ve come to regard him as an enthusiastic innovator in the shaping of metal. The solid

material that most of us regard as cold, hard and inflexible Blair sees as flowing, malleable and

waiting to be conformed to the shape and use he desires.

Blair matriculated through Northwest Community College’s tool and die program once upon time,

then through local machine shops before he started one of his own in the early 1990s in his

backyard then on Panola Avenue  that he immediately outgrew. He moved to a room in the

Plaspros building for about a year, but that proved too small.

In 1994, real estate developer Randy Boren built Blair a building at 210 Tower Drive in the

Harmon Industrial Park to house Batesville Tooling and Design.

The plan was to rent from Boren indefinitely, but within a couple of months with the help of the

Small Business Administration they gained financing not only to purchase the building but

additional tooling machinery as well.

“It was a big step for us,” said Blair’s wife, Janice, who wears a lot of hats in the family business,

including that of comptroller.

They created and rebuilt injection molds, fabricated parts and did whatever tool and die shops

do as they furnish infrastructure for this nation’s manufacturing processes. BTD prospered

during the booming economy of the 1990s, but by 2000 Gary Blair had seen the future. Much of

the work that his shop and those like it had been doing for years was going offshore, mostly to

China.

The future, Blair saw then, belonged to shops that could deliver a higher level of precision in

their work, like the precision required to produce medical components. And that’s what led him to

such close examination of those small, metal pieces that I had worn under my skin for about six

weeks during the summer of that year.

During the next decade or so, BTD enlarged its building and added equipment. Sons Jeff Blair

and Dan Blair became increasingly woven into the family team along with tool and die makers,

some from Gary’s alma mater. Insistence on precision eventually paid off with orders for more

complex molds and parts, including medical components. Their customers included neighbors in

the same industrial park, medical manufacturers in Memphis, auto manufacturers in Detroit and

widget manufacturers anywhere seeking precision in designing, manufacturing, refurbishing and

fabricating of molds and parts. BTD became ISO certified in 2007.

Most of Blair’s friends know him from his local universe. He’s active in the First Baptist Church

and the Panola chapter of The Gideons. He’s also active in the Kairos Christian prison ministry.

He’s an “aw, shucks,” kind of guy who loves his family, his dog and never, ever meets a stranger.

In his other universe — that of metal shapers — Blair is the same guy.

“What you see is what you get,” he’s said often.

But the similarity may end there. In the universe of metal shapers, he is highly regarded as an

expert at what he does, always pushing ahead to anticipate needs and trends that most in his

industry become aware of later.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, as BTD’s emphasis on precision continued,

Blair had gained respect for machine work in Japan.

“They were revolutionizing the way people make parts,” he said. “They’re holding incredible

accuracies.”

His respect led to BTD’s purchase last year of the Makino F5, a vertical machining center which

shapes and cuts metal in many ways to minute accuracies measured in microscopic increments.

It is controlled by Windows CE’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) with Makino proprietary

software.

“Instead of putting it into a craftsman’s hands, you’re putting it into a computer nerd’s hands,” \

Blair said.

The Makino purchase also led to an invitation that took Gary Blair and his associate, Gary

Melvin, on a trip to Tokyo to see how the machining center was being utilized in Japan’s

industrial applications. The Makino corporate powers-that-be got “What-you-see-is-what-

you-get” Gary Blair to come to their hometown.

And Makino must have been impressed. Last week they sent their film crew to BTD to video the

Makino F5 and to record interviews with the Blairs. The film will be used in an online version of

Competitive Moldmaking magazine. Dan Blair will speak at a industry trade show in Auburn

Hills, Michigan in the fall.

While Dan Blair was being interviewed in a separate office and Gary Blair waited his turn, the

latter began to talk about what’s coming next in his industry. He said that the virtual reality of

fabrication and molding will become made-to-order parts that will eliminate the need for

maintaining parts inventories and then shipping the needed part to the customer who is waiting

on it. Instead, Blair said, a customer who needs a part will contact a shop like BTD and have the

part custom made. The shop will only need to download the specifications for the part needed

and feed them into the waiting machine.

And as Blair talked about the virtual reality of made-to-order parts replacing inventoried parts, he

shifted to that same, far-away look that I recalled from his examination of those orthopedic

devices 13 years ago.