In January, the U.S. and China agreed to a trade deal that cut some U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods in exchange for Chinese pledges to purchase more American farm, energy and manufactured goods and address U.S. complaints about intellectual property practices.

A&H Meyer, a manufacturer of cable management systems for furniture, approached RNA Automation Ltd. to design a flexible automation system to sort, separate and feed busbars. The company wanted a system that could handle 12 different lengths of flat and crimped busbars with minimal changeover time.

The shop floor was hopping in mid-January at Dukane Corp.'s headquarters in St. Charles, IL, 35 miles west of Chicago. Technicians were busy assembling, tooling and testing a variety of machines, including the latest product in the company's arsenal of plastics assembly technologies: a hot-gas welding system.

Idle hands are the devil's workshop, or so my folks would like to remind me when I was growing up. Now, there's scientific evidence of just that.