Donald Rainville has started a new company — Advanced Auxiliary Equipment Inc. — marking a return to auxiliary manufacturing for Rainville, a former president of Universal Dynamics Inc.
AAE is small, with five employees operating out of a 6,000-square-foot building in Cobbs Creek, Va. The company has three products: loaders, feeders and drums to hold material.
Rainville said the company makes some components for the auxiliary equipment and buys some from outside suppliers.
He's glad to be back running a company.
“I'm having fun,” said Rainville, 55, who retired from auxiliary maker Una-Dyn in January 2007. He founded AAE in January 2009, after his noncompete agreement with Una-Dyn expired.
He said he will continue as a consultant to Novatec Inc., helping to develop that company's PET and polylactic acid business segments for crystallizers and dryers. His own new company opened quietly, offering Sure-Feed feeders and the materials-handling drums. Rainville decided to exhibit — and introduce a line of FlexMed loaders — at Plastec South, held April 28-29 in Charlotte, N.C.
Rainville said he treated the trade show as market research, to gauge interest in FlexMed. AAE ended up getting several orders for the loader. “The product was well-received,” he said.
FlexMed loaders are designed to be “medical molding-ready” but at a reasonable price, according to Rainville.
“They're stainless steel, polished inside and out. They have sanitary fittings — all the joints are machined and have silicone gaskets. It's really designed for medical molding, for clean rooms, yet it's priced to be competitive for more general use,” he said. The fittings and attachments also meet sanitary requirements for food products.
Advanced Auxiliary Equipment also plans to exhibit at the Plastec Midwest show, slated for Sept. 28-30 in Rosemont, Ill., he said.
Rainville's roots run deep in the auxiliary equipment business. His father, Dewey Rainville, bought Universal Dynamics in the early 1960s. The Rainvilles sold Una-Dyn in 1995 to auxiliary equipment maker Mann+Hummel GmbH of Ludwigsburg, Germany. Donald Rainville stayed on as president.
In 2008, Piovan SpA of Santa Maria di Sala, Italy, bought Woodbridge, Va.-based Una-Dyn from Mann+Hummel.
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