Roll-Kraft Celebrates 50th Anniversary
The company continues a legacy of tube and pipe and roll form tooling innovations that began in 1963.
Posted: June 28, 2013
The tube and pipe and roll form tooling manufacturer is happy to celebrate this benchmark in its history and looks forward to many more years of serving those industries.
Roll-Kraft (Mentor, OH) recently commemorated its 50-year anniversary of designing and manufacturing tooling for the tube & pipe and roll forming industry. Founded in 1963 by George F. Gehrisch, the company’s goal has always been to be the most reliable supplier of custom-designed roll tooling to every producer who uses welded tube or pipe products or roll forms open shapes.
The modest original facility, with its minimal staff, has been replaced by a 110,000 sq ft factory in and two additional plants, including one based in Canada, totaling more than 100 employees. The company now operates daily with a total of fifty CNC (computer numerical control) machines, including multiple large-capacity machines.
The U.S. headquarters factory produces roll tooling up to 40 in in diameter, while the Canadian plant produces tooling up to 52 in diameter – quite a sharp contrast to the customer requirements during the early years.
In 2001, the company became certified by the International Organization for Standardization to ISO 9001:2000 With Design, and is currently certified to ISO 9001:2008 With Design. The original certification was earned in 1997, and through annual audits, the company has maintained certification every year since then.
Roll-Kraft tooling is known worldwide and is used in fifty countries around the globe. The company has a fully staffed engineering department with expertise in designing tooling to manufacture a myriad of products, from furniture, curtain rods, and steel doors, to highway road signs, and even tooling used in the mining and energy sector.
Over the years, the company has added regional and on-site seminars to offer opportunities for companies in the industry to provide tube & pipe and roll forming training to their personnel. These efforts were acknowledged by the Tube and Pipe Association’s Industry Education Activities Award in 2003, which was awarded to Roll-Kraft’s Robert Sladky for his more than 30 years of training services.
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