Quaker City Castings Credited for Expansion

March 1, 2012
Ferrous foundrys growth plans on track

Quaker City Castings in Salem, OH, was granted a six-year, 36% tax credit by the Ohio Department of Development recently, which will support the ferrous foundry’s ongoing expansion program. The foundry’s plans will increase its workspace from 110,000 ft2 to almost 280,000 ft2, and may lead to as many as 30 new jobs.

Last summer, QCC outlined a plan to relocate its secondary operations (blasting, cutoff, torching, grinding, welding, heat treating) to a building it purchased adjacent to the existing foundry. That building had been vacated in 2010 by Colfor Manufacturing, a cold forging and machining operation.

Now, the company aims to acquire a third building nearby the one it bought last year, and with loading and shipping facilities, as well as additional space. The purchase was financed privately. The third building would be used for storage, initially, though longer-term plans are undetermined. “It’s a lot of space,” according to QCC vice president Geoff Korff.

The expansion program remains the same in other respects. The secondary processes will be moved to the new building as planned, with some of those functions coming online as early as May. The space in the original foundry will be reorganized to include a sand-reclamation operation.

QCC melts gray and ductile iron, carbon steel, stainless steel, and various specialty steel alloys and superalloys. Using centrifugal casting for smaller castings (up to 13 in. OD), and sand casting (for large components (up to 12,000 lb), it supplies cast parts for valve and pump manufacturing, power generation systems, heavy construction equipment production, gearmaking, and other markets.