Family-run company polishes off 50 years

Gary and Chris Brandt know the work done by their metal finishing company often gets overlooked, even by those in the metal industry.

Most people are familiar with metal stamping, plating and painting, but they forget about the finishing, Mr. Brandt said.

“This is the step in the middle that nobody thinks about,” Mrs. Brandt said.

That step involves taking the pieces of metal, from car door latches to orthopedic devices and links of chain, and tumbling, vibrating and blasting away the sharp edges until the item shines.

Mrs. Brandt works side by side with her husband, managing the inventory for the family-owned Brandt Industries, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary.

The process of finishing metal includes several techniques, from buffing to blasting. The vibratory method uses large drums or tumblers filled with different types of media ranging from titanium balls the size of a BB, to ceramic pieces as big as a golf ball. As the metal rolls around with the media at periods of 10 minutes or several hours, the rough edges are smoothed out and the surface becomes shiny.

Over those many years of operation the business had ups and downs — starting out with just two employees — and experienced what Mr. Brandt called some great years and some very lean ones.

At one point the company had as many as 54 employees and sales of more than $3 million a year. Today, business has leveled off and the company operates with 10 full-time and two part-time employees as it generates from about $1.6 million to almost $2 million a year in sales.

“There have been some years when we struggled to keep it going,” Mr. Brandt said.

The company now sits on Riverside Drive, but it started 1958 in a house in Red Bank.

Actually, the business started under the house.

“My grandfather and his two sons and a couple of sons-in-law took picks and shovels and dug out the basement of the house and poured a concrete slab and moved some tumblers in and that’s kind of where it got started,” he said.

Those periods through the years when business was booming coincided with an increased presence of automobile parts manufacturing in the South. Brandt polished carburetors for Holley Performance Products, which at one time had plants in Kentucky and Tennessee.

The company still polishes car latches for Toyota and Honda, orthotic and prosthetic devices for Chattanooga-based Fillauer Products Inc., and plumbing parts for various companies in the southeastern United States.

Mr. Brandt, 56, bought the company from his mother and some other family members in 2005.

“It’s a hundred percent mine now — all the headaches and everything else,” he said.

He and his wife said they are not sure what the future holds, but they know it will not be a fourth generation family-owned business. The couple has one son who lives in Wisconsin and drives a truck for a living, and their youngest son died in 2005.

Much of that future, however, depends on the economy and the demand for services his company provides, he said.

“(The business) is going to hold as long as we don’t see the auto industry move to China,” he said. “The future is still OK.”