Eric Albert calls his company, American Handforge, more or less “hidden.”
The aerospace-focused manufacturer doesn’t get much limelight, he says, but its parts and raw materials are crucial in the operations of “pretty much all of the aerospace companies and thousands of machine shops” in the U.S. and abroad.
The Irvine-based company operates a 150,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Rialto where it forges aluminum, titanium and various types of steel.
Clients
It has a client list of aerospace and engineering companies, including Boeing Co., Airbus, Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. and Parker Hannifin Corp. Its materials are also used by semiconductor companies, including Intel Corp., Apple Inc., Lam Research and Applied Material Inc.
“What we do is, it’s like playing with Play-Doh—you take it, work it over and over to a point where it gets hard and you can’t push through it anymore. … We do [that] with metal,” said Albert, who founded the company in 2001 and serves as chief executive. “We design chemistries and enhance the material and heat it to a certain temperature and thermal-process it, which makes it really strong. The material is able to stretch and break, hold up under enormous pressures. It’s not like buying a piece of metal at the hardware store. Everything has to be certified, X-rayed; it’s all very technical.”
American Handforge is a family-owned business involving Albert’s sons, Ryan and Jason, their mother, Tracy, and other extended family members. It has 80 employees and is expected to grow to about 100 next year, Albert said. Its Irvine corporate office has 12 employees who handle finance, legal, marketing and sales work.
The company was honored in the Up and Coming category of the Business Journal’s Family-Owned Business Awards, which took place Nov. 19 at Hotel Irvine (see related stories, pages 1, 5, 8 and 10).
Albert grew up in the forging business, working for his father’s company since he was 10.
“I worked during summer vacations to earn money for surfboards back in the 1970s,” he said. “[My dad] worked hard and brought me in to work for him. I hated it. I never wanted to do it. I’d get burned and come home with grease, but that’s just how it was.”
The business grew, and Albert worked in sales, which to him was more enjoyable than manufacturing.
“And then in my 30s, [my dad] decided to sell his business without telling anybody,” Albert said. “It was heartbreaking for me to learn that. So I ended up working for the company that bought his company. But they … bled the company dry. They made me the president, and I saw what they were doing. I thought, ‘This is my life; it’s all I’ve known. It’s a really good business. It’s a shame that they’re doing this.’ ”
2001
Albert left the company in February 2001, sold his possessions, and started American Handforge that August.
“And then guess what happened?” he said. “September 11th.”
He said all of his orders got canceled, and the situation called for him to “just work really, really hard and put in a lot of elbow grease.”
Substantial help came from Albert’s father’s old company, he said.
“They went under. They [had been] so leveraged. And all the customers came running over to us.”
American Handforge has been on a growth trajectory since, Albert said.
It’s on course to have more than $30 million in revenue this year and more than $40 million next year. About 40% of its business comes from exports.
Metal forging isn’t always about big, heavy materials, he said.
The company recently commercialized a technology that’s being used in smartphones and touch-screen devices.
“When you touch something, it creates a conductor, like a little switch,” Albert explained. “These conductors are 4 nanometers. For comparison, a living virus is 100 nanometers. So you can imagine how small this stuff is. So this material goes into vacuum chambers. When they’re making these chips, they’re under tremendous heat. That can break down the chamber walls, and the particles can get in to the chips and contaminate them. We’ve developed a chamber that lasts a long time and doesn’t break down.”
He said the American Handforge team spent seven years developing the technology, “finally got it figured out in 2012, and 2013 has been a huge year for us.”
Being American-made is also a booster for the business.
“Our industry is unique—it’s specification-driven,” he said. “We’re protected by the Federal Aviation Administration … (in) that the raw materials that go in the planes have to be made in the U.S. If it’s going to fly over the U.S., it has to be U.S. metal. … We have a lot of customers in Japan, Korea, Israel, India, Turkey who are machining the parts. They have to get the raw material from a U.S. company. So they come to us. We do advertise a little bit, but the specifications kind of dictate where they can go.”
