The idea that “what goes around comes around” could very well be the motto for the company known in its hometown since 1914 as Pittsburgh Gear, even while it has been owned since 1953 by Brad Foote Gear Works of Cicero, Illinois. Operating on Neville Island in the Ohio River, Brad Foote/Pittsburgh Gear Works provides the treatments that form the bookends in a three-stage manufacturing process that produces a vast array of high-quality, precision gears.
Now, the company’s reliability is moving the its products forward as part of a new company to drivewind turbines.
The company’s 42 employees at Neville Island provide all the initial heat treating and final carburizing for steel forgings that are machined in between those two steps into precision gears at Brad Foote’s two plants in Illinois. The gears that result have been reliable components for machines in steel mills, power plants, coal mines and many other industrial settings.
Will Willman, project manager at Neville Island, is proud of a history of gear-making that turns with success toward every revolution in modern industry.
“We’ve jumped into wind with both feet,” he says–or at least with every gear the company makes with “aircraft-quality precision.”
“Wind is going strong,” Willman says.
The Gear Works’ ability to roll ahead of the curve follows “boatloads of investment” in a state-of-the-art facility on Neville Island–and the apparent capacity of a technology that is as old as the wheel to migrate into every new industry. Toward that end, last year Brad Foote Gear Works became part of Broadwind Energy to reach emerging markets in alternative power.
Source: Brad Foote/Pittsburgh Gear Works, Will Willman
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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