Saginaw Precision is making missile-grade ball screws again in Saginaw, and plans to hire 35 machinists

SAGINAW, Mich. — A small Saginaw plant is back in the business of making precision ball screws, a part so hard to buy that it has slowed the production of missiles, aircraft and robots, and its new owner says it plans to hire dozens of skilled machinists as it grows.

Salient Motion, a defense and aerospace startup based in Hawthorne, California, launched the operation in late September as a new division called Saginaw Precision. The company acquired the Saginaw facility on June 1, and the first ball screw assembly came off the line on Aug. 3, founder and CEO Vishaal Mali told Manufacturing Dive.

What a ball screw does. A ball screw is a threaded steel shaft with a nut that rides on a loop of ball bearings. It turns a motor’s spin into exact, straight-line movement. In a missile, electromechanical actuators use ball screws to position the fins that steer it in flight, and a single missile typically uses four or more actuators, according to the company. The same parts move aircraft control surfaces and robot arms. The company says the screws are made to tolerances measured in fractions of the width of a human hair.

“Precision ball screws sit at the heart of the systems that move aircraft, missiles, and robots, yet much of that precision manufacturing capability has moved offshore,” Mali said in the company’s announcement. “This critical part is a constraint, and bringing it in-house gives us greater control end-to-end.”

Why Saginaw. The company says it chose the city for its history, calling Saginaw a historic center of American precision manufacturing and ball screw production, where generations of engineers and machinists built steering and motion systems and left behind know-how that is now scarce nationally. The Saginaw shop is led by Garrett O’Brien, whose former company was named a 2024 Supplier of the Year by Northrop Grumman for precision ball screw production, according to Salient Motion. Mali also credited Ben Davis and the rest of the Saginaw team. “This is specialized manufacturing expertise that only a handful of people in the country still have,” Mali said.

The numbers. The 17,000-square-foot plant, which the company calls SP-1, is projected to reach a capacity of about 50,000 ball screws a year by 2027, Manufacturing Dive reported. The company declined to say how many it makes today. It says its process, which pairs older ball screw expertise with software, standard machine tools, repurposed equipment and thread grinding, has cut the time to build a custom actuator prototype from years to about eight weeks. Those are company figures; we have not independently verified them.

What it means for local workers. The company had 10 employees at the plant in late September and expects to train and hire 35 “highly specialized machinists,” Mali told Manufacturing Dive, while adding machinery as fast as it can. Salient Motion says it plans to keep investing in the Saginaw operation and to hire from the region’s manufacturing workforce. It has not published wages or a hiring timeline. Machinists with grinding, inspection or tight-tolerance experience are the people the company says it needs; Salient Motion’s website is the place to watch for openings.

For Saginaw, it is a modest number of jobs but a notable kind: high-skill defense supply-chain work in a city with a long history in the trade. The company calls the plant the first in what it intends to build into a broader precision screw manufacturing platform.

Sources:
Salient Motion, “Salient Motion Launches Saginaw Precision to Manufacture Precision Ball Screws, a Critical Link in the Missile and Robotics Supply Chain,” news release, Sept. 28, 2026 (division launch, actuator and tolerance details, Mali quotes, Garrett O’Brien and Northrop Grumman award, SP-1 capacity, prototype lead times, Saginaw hiring plans), https://salientmotion.com/blog/salient-motion-launches-saginaw-precision
Manufacturing Dive, “Salient Motion establishes precision ball screw manufacturing segment,” Sept. 29, 2026 (June 1 acquisition, Aug. 3 first assembly, 17,000-square-foot plant, 10 employees, 35 machinists, undisclosed current capacity), https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/salient-motion-saginaw-precision-precision-ball-screw-manufacturing/831569/
Photo: Graibeard, “BallScrews-with-detail-insets.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), cropped and color-adjusted, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BallScrews-with-detail-insets.jpg

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