Bruin Manufacturing a pioneer in lights-out injection molding

Marshalltown, Iowa — Chad Dielschneider warned me that Bruin Manufacturing Co. would be like no injection molder I've ever seen.

In fact, he bet me.

Before we toured the company's main plant in Marshalltown, Dielschneider joked that if I'd ever seen anything like Bruin, he'd quit his job that day.

Within seconds of the start of the tour, I realized he was right. By the time we were finished, I'd completely forgotten about the bet.

So I guess Dielschneider gets to stay on as president and CEO.

What is different about Bruin?

First, it's all about lights-out manufacturing. There were a handful of workers on the day shift during my visit, doing tool changes and maintenance. But otherwise it was difficult to find workers on the plant floor to include in photos. Production continues on nights and weekends, but with no human witnesses.

The parts aren't all simple, either. Some use in-mold assembly, using the motion of the mold to join several components.

Second, the machinery is unique. Many of the injection presses were designed and built in-house. So were all of the tools. That's not an exaggeration; Bruin has a full tool shop with brand-new equipment and seven full-time toolmakers.

Even the hot runners are self-manufactured, which is something the company started in the 1960s. And there is ingenious automation, too, much of it also homemade, for handling and packaging finished parts, which makes lights-out manufacturing possible.

Bruin is headquartered on a quiet, leafy residential street in the county seat of Marshall County, 50 miles northeast of Des Moines.

Few North American injection molders can claim to be 70 years old and on their third generation of family ownership. But that's the story at Bruin. The company started as a machine shop in 1949, then moved into die casting, and first got into plastics in the late 1950s.

By the 1980s, it was solely focused on molding and toolmaking.

With that long history, you'd think Bruin would be a household name in plastics. Nope. This is a company that's taken a low profile. Until now, it's never been mentioned by Plastics News. Even some other molders in Iowa say they had not heard the name.

And that's exactly the way the founders, Clair and Dale Devick, liked it.

"If they were around, you wouldn't be here," said Sam Devick, the current owner and Clair's grandson, told me during my visit. "They didn't like the spotlight."

Clair and Dale were brothers who served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Clair, the older one, served in the 739th Engineers Heavy Shop Co. After the war, the brothers came home to Iowa and, with a partner, established Bruin.

Clair was an inventor and an entrepreneur, and he came up with many of the ideas that surprised me so much during my recent visit. In fact, many of the molding machines in Marshalltown are his design, or modified versions of name-brand presses that he "Bruinized."

"Clair had the attitude that if you wanted something, you built it rather than buy it," Dielschneider said. "In my opinion, the man was a genius."

Clair built his first manual molding machine in 1955. The company's third-oldest press, a fully automatic machine, is still running.

"His goal was 20 years, zero maintenance, and he reached it," Dielschneider said. "The old saying, 'when in doubt, make it stout,' yeah, well, that's what we did here."

That applies to the tooling side of the business, too.

"Molds here typically do not wear out," Dielschneider said. "Or, if they do, then we'll replace them for free for our customers. We figure if we design and we build them, then we'd better stand behind them. So a lot of those molds [from the 1950s] are still running, but we've had to retrofit them to run on an automatic machine.

"The roots of Bruin were formed on that toolroom. The quality of that tool, the ability to react, and also the response from our customers, we felt that was an important thing that we need to invest in," he said.

Clair and Dale retired around 1988. Clair's son, Bruce, was the next president and CEO. He served the company for 42 years. In 2017, Bruce, a private pilot, died in a small plane crash. That's when Bruce's son, Sam, joined Bruin.

Today, at age 43, Sam is the company's owner.

The company's culture hasn't changed. Sam had expertise in Lean Six Sigma from before he joined the company, but Bruin was founded on lean principles before lean was an industry term. There's still a focus on being ethical and on family. But Sam Devick is excited about some big changes.

In 2017, the company opened a second production plant, about 30 miles north of Marshalltown, in Newton, Iowa. Like the headquarters plant, Newton is highly automated, running lights-out 24/7.

The strategy behind opening a second location was to reduce risk, to keep customers' production running in case of a catastrophic emergency. It was something the team learned about through MAPP, the Manufacturers Association for Plastics Processors.

A year ago, the decision seemed prescient.

"When a tornado hit Marshalltown last July, it missed us by a block and a half," Dielschneider said.

The new location has lots of space to grow and the opportunity to try new things. All the presses are new Arburg machines. The machines are larger, up to 121 tons of clamping force. That's double the size of the largest presses in Marshalltown.

The company has a brand-new website, too, with photos and even video of the manufacturing process. Bruin is showing off its technology, but without giving away the secrets.

Like most companies, a big challenge is finding skilled workers, especially for the tool shop.

"As far as what keeps me up at night, it's the availability of mold makers out there. Mold designers, anything on the technical side, are very hard to find," Dielschneider said.

Carolyn Himes, Bruin's general manager and chief financial officer, talked about how the team dealt with the untimely death of Bruce Devick.

"For all three of us, I think, the 'what keeps you up at night' is the third generation. We know the statistics about how few companies survive three generations. Sam got it unexpectedly. He won't say that, but Sam's dad was killed in a plane crash. So it was just heaved upon him a little earlier than what he anticipated.

"Sam's dad had retired, and Chad and I were left with the reins, the actual management of the company. And I know [Chad] and I, our legacy for the place is we don't want to leave it in a crumbling heap. So it does keep us all up at night, and it affects all of our decisions on how we move forward and the money that we spend and how we spend it," Himes said.

That prompted Sam Devick to tell a story about some advice he got from his father:

"I was in the car with him, and he was kind of giving me a little pep talk," Devick said. "I was married, and I might have had a couple kids, or one kid at the time, and he said, 'Do you know what? You're fortunate.' And I said 'How so.'

"He said, 'You go to work and you worry about your family and how to take care of your family.' And I said, 'That's right.'

"And he goes, 'I have to worry about 40 families. And that the decisions that I make, and that Chad and Carolyn make, they don't affect just Chad and Carolyn and Bruce. They affect 42 families. And that's what keeps me up at night.'

"I always remember that. And now that as things have progressed, it's spot on."