Marquardt Manufacturing

Four years ago, the Marquardt Co., a Van Nuys-based weapons maker, had more than $100 million in defense contracts, 1,100 workers and what looked like a rosy future. Today the company has been broken up into three businesses. One of them is in bankruptcy court and is also suing its former parent company in a dispute over assets, including the rights to what could be a lucrative tank-bomb business.

Drivers who haul furniture for North American Van Lines are about to get a firsthand look at the forces reshaping the U. S. defense industry. North American, a unit of Norfolk Southern Corp., last month ordered a $220,000 computerized simulator for testing and training its drivers. The simulator's builder: a joint venture that includes Perceptronics Inc., a Woodland Hills defense contractor that mainly produces tank- and missile-training simulators for the Pentagon.

One unsettling side effect of the wrenching cutbacks in the manufacturing, aerospace and defense industries has been the dumping of large commercial and industrial properties on an already depressed real estate market. In the past few years, the huge Van Nuys General Motors auto assembly plant, Stroh Brewery in Van Nuys, 380 acres in Burbank owned by Lockheed Corp.