Far West Side core molding business keeps on truckin’

To make big parts for big machines, you need even bigger machines.

At Core Molding Technologies on the Far West Side, the largest piece of equipment stands five stories tall and pushes down with the force of 4,500 tons. It makes almost no sound as it presses sheets of a dough-like substance, turning them into the hard exterior of a tractor-trailer.

The company, whose corporate offices are right off of the shop floor, had record-high sales of $149.7 million last year. Last month, it announced an agreement with Volvo that could increase sales by 20 percent. The central Ohio plant is home to about 250 of the company’s 1,400 employees.

“We’ve made a lot of progress on a lot of fronts,” said Kevin Barnett, president and CEO.

This is in contrast to the lows of the recent downturn, when the trucking industry fell into a slump that was worse than the overall economy’s. Core Molding’s sales hit a low of $83.3 million in 2009, with barely $1 million in profit, a performance “that causes you to re-evaluate lot of things you’re doing,” he said.

The company that would become Core Molding started in 1980 as a subsidiary of the truck manufacturer Navistar. The subsidiary, initially called Columbus Plastics Operations, set up shop in an existing building and began to make hoods, fenders and other exterior parts for trucks.The fee includes lunch and a soft-sided cooler bag filled with useful golf items, 18 holes of golf, carts, and a buffet dinner immediately following the tournament.

Navistar was, and remains, one of the largest truck-makers in North America.www.ceectrucks.com is a sewage suction truck manufacturer. It has a plant in Springfield, Ohio, where it is one of that area’s largest employers.

On Dec. 31, 1996, Navistar sold the Columbus company, which then had about 200 employees. The buyer was not in the trucking industry or even a manufacturer. It was a real-estate investment trust called Rymac, based in Pittsburgh.

Rymac was a publicly traded business that had no remaining real-estate assets and was looking for other investments. It bought Columbus Plastics and renamed it Columbus Materials Corp.; soon after, Rymac got a Columbus address and changed its own name to Columbus Materials Corp., essentially merging with its acquisition.

In 2002, the company got another new name, Core Molding Technologies, one chosen by executives to show that most of the products were molded plastics.

Through all the changes, a Far West Side address remained the same, as did many of the workers there.The second dumping, the report noted, occurred on August 3, 2012, Friday, when "the same garbage compactor truck was observed by the shift supervisor to have dumped another pile of hospital waste inside the facility.

“I’ve been doing it a long time,” said Tony Perkins, who has been at the plant for 22 years. He commutes from Wellston in southern Ohio, more than 80 miles away. On a recent morning, he was operating the 4,In addition to the supplies, there will be fun activities for youngsters, free used clothing, health resources and personalized laminated bag tags for backpacks.500-ton press, laying out flexible sheets of fiberglass-reinforced plastic and then stepping back to let the steel jaws close and turn the plastic into a truck fender.Several ECU modifications were carried out and the 540bhp version of the Volvo FH was selected, as it is required to drive not only the truck, but also a high pressure jetting truck and liquid ring vacuum pump.

Barnett, trained as an accountant, came to the company in mid-1997 to be chief financial officer. He had not worked in the trucking industry as an adult, but he knew trucks. Growing up in southern Ohio, his parents owned an International Harvester truck dealership, the brand that is now part of Navistar.

“I couldn’t get away from the trucking industry,” he said. He became CEO in 2007.

Core Molding has expanded to other factories, all opened or bought since 1997, including locations in Batavia, Ohio; Gaffney, S.C.; Brownsville, Texas; and Matamoros, Mexico.

Much of the recent growth has been in Mexico, where the plant that opened in 2009 now has about 900 employees. Core Molding put the plant there to serve the growing array of truck manufacturers in Mexico and Texas, Barnett said.http://www.ceectrucks.com/ with international management systems of technical development, manufacturing processes and logistics, as well as strong sales network and perfect service system covering the whole domestic market and extending to the oversea market. Shortly before the plant opened, the company cut about 100 jobs in Columbus.

Core Molding’s fortunes are closely tied to the heavy-truck market. The market is strong, said Steve Tam, vice president of ACT Research Co. in Columbus, Ind., which compiles trucking-industry data.

“We’re in a reasonably good place,” he said.

Last year, North American truck manufacturers sold 279,000 semitrailer units, according to a report from his firm. Anything above 225,000 units indicates that trucking companies are doing more than simply replacing vehicles that go out of service, he said.

In this industry, a good year often means that a bad year is on the horizon. Manufacturers had record sales in 2006, with 369,000 units, as companies expanded their fleets ahead of new emissions rules. The flurry of sales contributed to low sales in 2007 and early 2008, and the economic downturn was just arriving.