Amerequip
š Kiel, WI
WhenĀ AmerequipĀ needed newĀ finishingĀ equipment,Ā the decision to invest in aĀ Batch Burn-Off Oven from Global Finishing Solutions (GFS) was an easy one, asĀ Nick VollrathĀ knew the payback period would be shortĀ and trustedĀ theĀ equipment manufactured in his backyard.
Please introduce your business and tell us your story.
āWe have about 300 employees at Amerequip, providing custom equipment and OEM solutions. We have a full fabrication department. We laser everything, then weld it, paint it and assemble it. We have odds and ends that we outsource for plating and machining, but nearly everything is manufactured in-house.ā
What services do you offer and what kind of jobs do you usually perform?
āOur biggest product line is backhoes in the compact utility tractors (CUT) market. Most of our backhoes are for residential or small farms. We also manufacture a lot of commercial walk-behind lawnmowers. We have an in-house design and engineering team. We do contract work as well, where something is already designed and we just manufacture it.ā
How did you decide on GFS equipment?
āWe chose GFS because we are located in Wisconsin, and their equipment is manufactured in Wisconsin. We also have worked with our GFS distributor, Kent Lindquist of ICAFe, for many years. We knew we would get the service we wanted from someone we have worked with for a while, rather than going with a different company.ā
How has GFS equipment changed your processes and impacted your business?
āOur GFS Batch Burn-Off Oven is the newest piece of equipment in our paint department. We use it mainly for burning off hooks and chains, for hanging parts through our paint system. We were able to justify the cost of adding the burn off oven based on the savings of no longer having to send out production parts. We used to shot blast all of our hooks to clean the paint off, but we couldnāt do that with production parts. That need is now eliminated, as we can now do that in-house with the burn off oven.
Our shot blaster was very old, and we were looking at $180,000 for a new shot blaster. It would have been a big investment, and there wouldnāt have been much of a payback for the shot blaster. The GFS batch oven gave us a payback on not having to send the production parts out to be stripped, and we estimate the payback period on the batch oven to only be about 1 Ā½ years.ā