The Charles River has been a center of manufacturing for centuries, and the tradition continues today. A 40-year-old company that makes millions of parts each year in its facility that sits just a block from the river.
High Tech Turning, located at 16 Bridge St., creates thousands of tiny parts used in high-tech medical devices. The company has moved around a few times in its four decades — to Waltham and the other side of the river on California Street — and has called Bridge Street its home for the past quarter century, said President and CEO Paul Heanue, who founded the company.
“I would say you could put a five iron in the Charles River from every location,” he said.
The workforce of about 40 employees works with lathes and mills to take long rods of metals and other materials and whittle them down into parts that are dwarfed by a finger tip. Watertown News toured High Tech Turning in May and Paul showed just one of many parts being made, a tiny ball bearing.
“It’s actually a big one of our small parts,” Paul said. “The outside is 42,000th of an inch.”
A run of 6,000 tiny parts can fit inside a container the size of a matchbox. Other parts are much larger, such as a rod used in a hospital HVAC system.
The machines are guided by computers programmed to create the precise parts. High Tech Turning also uses computer-aided quality controls to make sure they fit within strict size requirements, sometimes as little as 10,0ths of an inch. The industry is known as computer numerical control, CNC, said Taylor Heanue, Paul’s son and the company’s Vice President of Development.
“According to some estimates, I think Fortune said it was a $100 billion industry,” Taylor said.
Over 40 years, High Tech Turning has grown, but many things have stayed the same, Paul said.
“I started with one machine that was a simplified version of this, but it was the same principle,” he said.
Now there are dozens of machines. Paul calls High Tech Turning a family business, and not just because he works with his son.
“We try to treat everyone as family,” he said.
The company has had a high rate of worker retention, Taylor said, with an average length of employment of 10 years, 50% of the employees have been with the company for over 15 years, and about 20% have been with High Tech Turning for over 30 years.
Having a consistent workforce helps the company provide consistent quality products.
“One of the things that we really take pride in is that when we hire people on here, they often stay, and that’s great for us, because you know we get to keep the same employees and continue to work with them and train them,” Taylor said. “It’s also great for our customers, because the same person who worked on your part the last time you ordered is probably the same person who’s going to work on your part the next time you order. That means it’s going to be made the same way, and it’s more consistency for our customers. So it ends up being a win-win.”
The location near Boston and Cambridge has proven to be an asset, said Ed Daly, High Tech Turning’s Director of Marketing & Sales.
“We think we’re in just the right spot for this type of business today, because we get customer calls from Watertown, we get them from surrounding areas, we get them across the country, but in this state in particular, we all know that it’s a medical hotbed,” Daly said. “And whether it’s a life sciences business or a medical device company, it’s a great location to be.”
Many customers have worked with High Tech Turning for many years, and they advance together. In the world of medical devices, precision is key, Taylor said, and they are always looking to make devices smaller. One example, he said, is devices to remove clots from blood vessels. They started working on blood vessels in the heart, but have gradually been able to address clots in narrower veins and arteries.
“The thing with medical devices is everything has got to be super precise so that all your procedures are the same, and they want things to be as small as possible, because we’re trying to do things for little holes these days,” Taylor said. “So the fact that we got machines that can operate more accurately, make tinier parts, is helping to drive the medical device designers to be able to make less invasive operations and really improve the health of people.”
The overall design of a device may stay similar, but they are made smaller and smaller each year.
“So it’s like we’re helping each other,” Taylor said.
In 2025, High Tech Turning shipped more than 9 million parts, Taylor said, which was a million more than the previous year. In 2026, the company is on track to produce about 9.5 million parts.
Part of the growth has been the changes in global trade and manufacturing.
“We’re seeing a lot of our customers that we hadn’t worked with, because, for a number of years, they moved some of their manufacturing offshores,” Taylor said. “Some of those customers are now looking to re-shore their same parts that they’re using because they don’t want to have to pay the tariffs. And that’s really good for us and good for all the people that work here because when you’re doing the manufacturing in the United States, that’s where the tariffs help those people.”
Startup companies also come to High Tech Turning, Paul said. Taylor said these firms can be a high growth area.
“When you work with startup companies, you’re planting seeds,” Taylor said. “Maybe those will turn into something big, and as those customers grow. That really helps us to grow as well.”
Many customers are within an easy drive of High Tech Turning
“Generally people like to work with machine shops that are local, because you can just walk down there and say, ‘Hey, this is what I need.’ ‘Can you take a look at this?’ which is kind of hard to do over the internet, even with web meetings that they have these days,” Taylor said. “And then even to be able to deliver parts or pick up parts and just show up here.”
The growth in demand has been significant enough that the company is looking to expand its facility. It won’t go far, though.
“We’re looking at a satellite location right now to where we can move some machines over there,” Taylor said. “It’s within walking distance.”
High Tech Turning will also need to grow its workforce. Years ago, vocational schools provided a pipeline of workers, but that is not as common any more. The company often hires people who have gone through a training program, and they currently have a co-op student from a local college. Sometimes they come from unusual programs.
“Ideally someone will have some kind of training where they’ve been through a program, we always say one of our best machinists, she doesn’t work here anymore, but she came in as a line cook and was just like a really good attention to detail, good with her hands,” Taylor said. ” She had worked in a restaurant and came in and we trained her to work on the machine, and she was just really efficient and kept everything going.”
Many employees live in or around Watertown, which helps with worker satisfaction, Taylor said.
“We love to hire local people, because one of the things we try to do is is provide a really good work experience and a work life balance,” Taylor said. “So we try to hire people that are local, so that they don’t get stuck with a long commute, because that could really drag on somebody’s overall image of their job and scout satisfaction.”