oledo Screw was started by Gilbert Toledo.
On April 1, 1969, William Bjork purchased Toledo Screw. At that time, the shop was in an oversized garage. After 2 moves, the shop moved to its current location in 1971. At that time, the shop was 8,000 square feet. Jack Schmittel started with Toledo Screw as the plant manager right at this time. The shop was air conditioned and had Brown and Sharpe cam screw machines and a small secondary department. In 1986, Alan Bjork (Bill’s son) came back to work at the shop. Rick Schmittel (Jack’s son) also started at this time. The shop expanded from 8,000 to 20,000 sq ft and we purchased our first CNC Brown and Sharpe. The shop grew and reached a peak of 20 employees.
In the 1990’s, we converted almost all of our Brown and Sharpes to CNC control and automated our secondary department. We added an EDM machine to make our own tooling around this same time. Around 2006, William Bjork sadly passed away and Jack had retired, leaving their sons to fill in their positions. We went through the great recession and lost 50% of our business when one customer went Chapter 11. In 2009, we purchased our swiss screw machine. It was an 11 axis Hanwha 1 3/8″ swiss screw machine. This replaced our secondary department and all of our complicated jobs with many operations ran on this machine. Our work in process dropped so much, that we currently have about 800 steel pans that are no longer used. It was a HUGE increase in productivity.
Since then, we have added three 11 axis Tsugami BH38 machines and a Tsugami BO38 swiss machine. We are one of the few job shops running 11 axis swiss machines.
