Greenerd Press & Machine Co. Inc., Nashua, N.H., has been in business since 1883 and started building hydraulic presses around 1935. Since then, the company has continued to evolve and now works with customers to create presses that fit specific applications.

It was not always possible to create a customized press. Tom Lavoie, applications and customer service manager, comments that “through the years we had standard designs because back then a lot of today’s frames were not fabrications but were castings.

“For a long time we had a range of presses that were made using these castings. Around the mid-1960s to early 1970s, we began to fabricate frames by taking steel plate and welding it. At that point we could offer any size machine. Tonnage wasn’t a concern anymore, as far as the overall size of the machine went. With the castings, you were kind of limited to a certain tonnage range to get a larger daylight, stroke or table size.”

Take your pick

Today, customers have the option to choose a customized press over a standard press, which allows them to fit the machine to the application. “Today, production methods are getting more involved,” says Lavoie. “Instead of customers making a standard press work in the application, with a little or a lot of customization they can make it a true fit.”

And, when it comes to custom presses, customers can get just about anything. “The hydraulic circuit, as far as speeds, can be customized,” says Lavoie. They can also get “multiple cylinders being actuated synchronously and any table size. We’re not really limited today at all when it comes to the overall size of the press, other than maybe a customer limitation to get it in their facility. We can also customize controls to a particular process or application and design the hydraulics to meet that same application, as well as the frame and the tonnage, too. We make the press so that it is what the customer needs—not necessarily something they have to accept,” says Lavoie.

Eliminating the guesswork

And, there’s no reason to be nervous about ordering a customized press. Lavoie and Mike Moran, national sales manager for Greenerd, talk with every customer that calls in for a quote. Lavoie says that they do this “because the particular application for the customer may not trigger anything in their mind as far as an option or a customization that might work better for their situation, but Mike and I are on the phone every day with many customers. We see tons of applications, and sometimes when someone calls us up and says that they’re trying to do something, there are options that we have done before that will help them. We work very hard with our customers to try to understand what they are going to be doing so their press has the features necessary to accomplish the task.

Greenerd does all sales, design and build, and service from its plant and is very involved with the ANSI B-11.2 requirement. “This is an important specification,” says Lavoie, “because it allows for redundancy in both your hydraulic and electric controls. All of our presses built today meet the ANSI B-11.2 specification.”

Lavoie also notes that “85 percent to 90 percent of what we do is custom.” He says that custom may mean adding just a couple of inches to table size, a larger daylight or stroke. “Customization really means that you can’t pull it out of the catalog.” The company’s main customers include Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 automotive; foundries; foodservice; metal stamping; and compression molding. “It’s really a varied customer base,” said Lavoie. “In the past few years, stamping and a lot of the metals work has gone overseas. So we’ve begun to look at other applications, such as the compression molding market here in the United States, which is growing—as opposed to dwindling—and trying to make inroads into those markets.