Diversified delivers on promise of its name

Warrensville Heights, Ohio —​ For Diversified Mold & Castings, the first word — diversified — tells a lot of the story.

The company, now in its third generation of family ownership, makes tooling for rotational molding and thermoforming using three processes: CNC, cast aluminum and fabricated molds.

"That's kind of what differentiates us from some of the other mold builders out there, is we can truly do all three processes in-house. And we've been casting metal for the life of the company, which is 79-plus years," CEO Vince Costello said.

Diversified Mold & Castings hosted a factory tour June 6 for attendees of the Society of Plastics Engineers' Rotational Molding Conference in Cleveland.

Costello's grandfather, Luke Beinke, started the company in 1939 as Plaster Process. It was a foundry that made cast aluminum tools in plaster. After Beinke's unexpected death in 1965, his son-in-law — and Vince Costello's father — Sam Costello took over the family-run business and bought it the ​ following year. He got into sand casting.

Vince Costello bought it from his father in 1996. When he began working there full time in 1993, he was employee No. 6. He moved the company into full tool building. In the late 1990s. Vince brought in a partner, Randy Johnson, and his tooling company, John-Del. In 2007, Costello bought the full business and began the merging processes.

That same year, Diversified Mold & Castings moved to its current 68,000-square-foot building in Warrensville Heights, near Cleveland. Diversified merged with two other companies and today employs 45.

Costello said the company has made thermoforming tooling for more than 30 years. Diversified got into rotomolding tooling around 2000. Sales are about $5 million.

Offering all three types of mold making is the company's strength, Costello said. The rotomolding industry is moving to CNC machining and fabrication, he said.

Molds made by CNC machining are the highest quality, with a high level of dimensional accuracy. But Costello said fabricated molds have improved dramatically, thanks to modern metal fabrication methods like CNC metal bending and plasma cutting.

"With a lot of the new technology and CNC press brakes, you can make a lot more geometry, accurately, with fabricating sheet metal," he said. "So it's still a very inexpensive way to get into a market. And you can make some relatively complex shapes today with fabricating molds."

Diversified Mold & Castings uses a combination of technologies to make some molds, for example, casting the main mold and then CNC machining sections of the tool.