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Nikola Motor has started hiring for its Arizona Research & Development Center that is slated to open in November in Phoenix, Ariz. The facility will test and develop the Nikola’s hydrogen electric Class 8 trucks. The company has received 10,000 orders so far, including a high profile order from Anheuser Busch for 800 trucks. The first vehicle prototypes, along with heavy-duty demonstration stations, are being built for the concept testing phase to roll out later this year. “We want the world’s top talent in vehicle electrification, fuel cell development, hydrogen storage and hydrogen fueling to apply for these premium positions,”...

Connecticut manufacturers, looking to fill thousands of jobs, are reaching beyond community colleges and vocational schools to persuade high school students to embrace careers in 21st-century factories. It’s not an easy task as educators and manufacturers battle stereotypes of old, dirty factories. “The struggle has been getting the kids to see it,” said Mark Ruede, assistant principal at Manchester High School. “We definitely have some perception work to do in town.” Manchester High School students have visited Pratt & Whitney in Middletown where the United Technologies Corp. subsidiary manufactures jet engines, he said. What began as a trip to teach...

Last December, President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law. The largest shake-up to the federal tax code in more than 30 years, the law includes myriad changes that will benefit manufacturers. Among other things, the law reduces the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent and repeals the corporate alternative minimum tax. The law also allows companies to immediately expense the full cost of qualified property acquired and placed into service before 2023. And, it maintains the R&D tax credit. While stumping for the bill, President Trump predicted tax reform would be “rocket fuel” for...

U.S. Steel Corp. says it will restart the second of two shuttered blast furnaces at its Granite City mill and hire 300 employees. The decision by the Pittsburgh-based company follows a March announcement that it would restart the other blast furnace at the Granite City Works in the Metro East and recall 500 workers. U.S. Steel laid off hundreds of workers when it idled the furnaces in late 2015, with employment at the nearly 2,000 worker plant dipping as low as 100 in the ensuing two years. The company says the restart of the first furnace is in progress and...

Andy Marsh’s New York factory is trapped in the Trump trade wars. As Mr. Trump threatens tariffs on America’s economic allies and its adversaries, many of the domestic businesses that the president says his policies are meant to protect are finding themselves victims of his aggressive approach. Prices are rising for imported goods, other nations are erecting retaliatory trade barriers, and companies like Plug Power, the manufacturing business that Mr. Marsh runs outside Albany, are facing crippling uncertainty from Mr. Trump’s fickle approach. It is not the first time Mr. Marsh has felt firsthand the impact of decisions made hundreds...

Rolls-Royce North America is adding about 100 jobs at its Prince George County manufacturing plant this year. Employment at the Crosspointe factory should reach 400 or more by the end of the year as it adds production to meet demand in the aircraft industry, said Lorin S. Sodell, manufacturing executive at the plant. The Rolls-Royce facility opened in 2011 on a 1,000-acre site in Prince George. It makes precision aircraft components such as rotative discs and turbine blades. Sodell said Rolls-Royce employed about 300 people at the plant at the start of 2018. So far this year, the company has...

GRESHAM, Ore. (AP) — The De Beers Group has announced plans to manufacture synthetic diamonds at a factory in Gresham, Oregon. The British diamond giant said in a news release Tuesday it will spend $94 million on the production facility over the next four years. Once fully operational, the plant will be able to annually produce 500,000 rough carats of lab-grown diamonds. The diamonds will be marketed under the name Lightbox. They will retail from $200 for a quarter-carat stone to $800 for a one-carat stone — much less than traditional diamonds....

Late April saw the entrance of a heavyweight amid the handful of much smaller companies staking out the new territory of industrial additive manufacturing. Jabil, a $19-billion global enterprise with around 180,000 employees and over 100 facilities in 29 countries, announced the launch of the Jabil Additive Manufacturing Network as a “digital thread” to connect its additive manufacturing operations around the world, including those at its subsidiaries Nypro and Jabil Green Point, while aligning with Jabil’s software and services for supply-chain management, product development, and engineering/design. Jabil, which operates 15,000 CNC mills along with thousands of injection machines and hundreds...

So much for Donald Trump as genius deal-maker. We are supposed to believe his tariff threats are a clever negotiation strategy, but on Thursday he revealed he’s merely an old-fashioned protectionist. His decision to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Europe, Canada and Mexico will hurt the U.S. economy, his own foreign policy and perhaps Republicans in November. In March Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross dangled temporary exemptions to 25% steel and 10% aluminum tariffs to extort trade concessions from U.S. allies. Mr. Ross withdrew the exemptions on Thursday, saying the U.S. “was unable to reach satisfactory arrangements” with...

German magazine Wirtschaftswoche said U.S. President Donald Trump aimed to push German carmakers out of the United States, and that he told French President Emmanuel Macron he wanted to stop Mercedes-Benz from cruising through New York. German carmakers control 90 percent of the U.S. premium auto market, with BMW owning the Rolls-Royce and BMW brands while Daimler has Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen controls Bentley, Bugatti, Porsche and Audi. The Trump administration has opened a trade investigation into whether vehicle imports have damaged the U.S. auto industry. Citing several unnamed European and U.S. diplomats, the magazine said on Thursday that he told...

Toyota Motor Corp. said Wednesday that its exports to the U.S. rose 22% in April, highlighting the problem it faces if the Trump administration makes good on threats to impose higher tariffs on imports. The problem is crystallized in one model: the RAV4 sport-utility vehicle. It is the most popular Toyota among American consumers—and none are made in the U.S. More than half are imported from Japan, while the rest are made in Canada and imported tariff-free under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“Made in the U.S.A.” has been in decline for decades, but in the last few years it has shown signs of an incipient comeback. Even as the number of manufacturing jobs has decreased, manufacturing output—the value of goods made here—has increased substantially. We still make $5.4 trillion worth of stuff annually here, and 12.4 million Americans still work in the manufacturing sector. But Trump administration tariffs, speculation about a trade war, and the continued march toward automation make the future of American manufacturing less certain. For this special report, we surveyed 26 of the largest manufacturers in the country—and a...

Australian company Titomic has unveiled what it claims is the world's largest metal 3D printer at its fully automated Melbourne facility. Utilizing a patented process co-developed with Australian federal scientific research agency the CSIRO, the 3D metal printer boasts a build area 9 m long, 3 m wide and 1.5 m high (29.5 x 9.8 x 4.9 ft), however the printing process isn't constrained to this booth size, meaning it could be used to print even larger objects. The unit prints layer by layer like existing 3D printers, but rather than relying on metal powders that are fused using extreme...

“Manufacturing in America is now rising to new heights, thanks to tax reform, and as a result, manufacturers of all sizes are already investing more, growing more, hiring more and paying more," association board member David Farr, the chief executive officer of Emerson Electric Co., said in a statement. "They are already improving lives and livelihoods.” In manufacturing, 86 percent of companies are investing in new equipment and facilities, according to a National Association of Manufacturers survey published last week. Beginning this year, the law allowed companies to deduct from their reported income the full cost of large equipment and...

Harley-Davidson, the iconic American motorcycle company, is set to lay off hundreds of American workers at its Kansas City, Missouri factory while creating jobs in Thailand. After laying off nearly 200 American manufacturing workers last year, as Breitbart News reported, Harley-Davidson is expected to fully close its Kansas City manufacturing facility, leaving 800 workers out of work. Harley-Davidson executives say about 400 jobs will be sent to the corporation’s York, Pennsylvania manufacturing plant, but union workers allege their jobs are being sent overseas to Thailand. In remarks to USA Today, a manufacturing worker who’s been at Harley-Davidson for more than...

Harley-Davidson, the iconic American motorcycle company, is set to lay off hundreds of American workers at its Kansas City, Missouri factory while creating jobs in Thailand. After laying off nearly 200 American manufacturing workers last year, as Breitbart News reported, Harley-Davidson is expected to fully close its Kansas City manufacturing facility, leaving 800 workers out of work. Harley-Davidson executives say about 400 jobs will be sent to the corporation’s York, Pennsylvania manufacturing plant, but union workers allege their jobs are being sent overseas to Thailand. In remarks to USA Today, a manufacturing worker who’s been at Harley-Davidson for more than...

Imagine a world where anyone with access to a simple and affordable piece technology could produce their own deadly weapons on demand. This hypothetical future is the focus of a new report from the RAND Corporation think tank, which looks at the potential threats to personal, national and global security posed by the proliferation of 3D printing—also known as additive manufacturing (AM). Additive manufacturing is a term used to describe various technologies which produce three-dimensional objects by “printing” layer-upon-layer of a given material, while following a digital blueprint. Although the technology is currently fairly limited in some respects, it is...

HUDSON — Brandt Group of Companies is now in business in McLean County. The Canadian agriculture manufacturer has started making grain-conveying and grain-handling equipment with 75 employees at 19500 N. 1425 East Road in rural Hudson after spending the last few months preparing the plant, Brandt President Shaun Semple told The Pantagraph on Tuesday. "We took two products to get the initial management team up and running," said Semple. "Our hope is to be at 150 (employees) by the end of the first year of production. ... We could get up to 250 or 300 by the end of the...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Encouraged by a booming demand for construction equipment, Mike Haberman was planning in early February to hire at least 30 more workers for the manufacturing facility of his Gradall Industries in Ohio. That plan now is shelved, Haberman said, because the cost of steel used in Gradall’s telescopic excavators and vacuum trucks shot up by one-third following President Donald Trump’s crackdown on steel imports. As steel costs account for 35 percent of his cost of production, he fears rising prices would not only hurt his export sales, but also give an edge to foreign rivals at home....

Record exports trimmed the U.S. trade deficit in March, the first drop in seven months in a massive gap that President Donald Trump is determined to shrink with an aggressive America first policy. The Commerce Department says the trade deficit — the difference between what America sells and what it buys in foreign markets — slid to $49 billion, down from $57.7 billion in February and lowest since September. Trump has vowed to bring down America’s massive deficits, which he blames on bad trade agreements and abusive practices by U.S. trading partners. Exports rose in March to a record $208.5...