How he had loved his tools—the pleasing heft of a micrometer; the fluid swivel of a bench vise; the sleek beauty of his favorite surface plate, a one-foot-square slab of speckled pink granite. He called it Pinky, like a pet. Surface plates of all sizes lived at Pierce Machine, but Pinky was Frank’s go-to, sixty pounds, smoothed to a tolerance of a tenth of a thousandth of an inch, one-thirtieth of a human hair.
