Local Plant Grows From Cabinets To World’s Leading Pultruder

BRISTOL, Va. – In its first life, the manufacturing plant made television cabinets. Then it made aircraft for the Canadian Air Force. Then it made carbon parts for atomic research to support U.S. efforts in World War II.

In 85 years of existence, the plant has been passed from one company to another and gone in and out of business, until coming solidly under local control in the early 1990s.

The chemically fragrant plant now known as Strongwell has evolved to become the world’s leading pultruder.

But what exactly does a pultruder do? What is pultrusion? And how did a Bristol manufacturer become the world leader at it?

“Well, it’s similar to extrusion,” John Tickle, Strongwell’s president, said in a November interview. Seeing he was getting nowhere with a reporter, Tickle resorted to examples: fiberglass ladder rails, door moldings, siding on houses, Corvette bodies, ski poles, shovels and rakes.

Pultruded materials are reinforced plastics made through a specific process: poured into a kind of mold and forged under high heat as they are pulled through a continuous device.

The upshot of Strongwell’s specialty is this: The company, led by Tickle, made a gamble that the world would have a need for a material as hard as steel that was comparatively lightweight. And they made themselves a go-to producer.

So it is, that while unemployment is soaring Tickle is boasting that he has never laid off an employee in his 37 years leading the company. So it is, that while bankruptcies seem destined to rise Strongwell has recently received its “largest order ever.”

And yes, Tickle said, he is expecting his company to have an increase in sales this year.

“We have more inquiries now than we can possibly handle,” he said.

From wood to plastic

The plant got off to a rocky start – actually a series of stops and starts that lasted for its first 49 years.

Then a furniture factory, a wage dispute in 1935 left the plant closed until 1940, when it roared back to life to churn out carbon for the war effort. The plant reached its peak employment of 2,300 during World War II, Tickle said.

After the war, the Bristol plant went back to producing radio and television cabinets, and also began dabbling in reinforced plastics – eventually leading to the creation of two separate divisions for wood and plastics.

The company performed its first pultrusion in 1956, and three years later began producing a fiberglass ladder rail that turned out to be a key point of entry into the reinforced plastics market and is still around today. Shortly thereafter, in 1962, a labor dispute ended the woodworking division and the company shifted its focus to churning out plastics.

At the time, the plant was owned by a Philadelphia family, who sold it to the Pittsburgh-based Koppers Co. in 1965, according to the history posted on Strongwell’s Web site. Koppers put a premium on developing reinforced plastics, and six years later sold to Bob Morrison, an Ohio businessman.

It was Morrison who folded the Bristol plant into his Morrison Molded Fiber Glass Co., and who tapped Tickle, a 30-year-old Bristol native then running a fiberglass manufacturing plant in Green Bay, Wis.
When Tickle moved into his current office – built in 1922, the same one he has occupied for 37 years – no owner of the Bristol plant had managed to make sustained profits. Under the Morrison umbrella, the plant had just $900,000 in sales of pultruded products, and Tickle, an engineer by training, pushed this hard, he said.

Morrison Molded Fiber Glass Co. “had a lot of patents,” Tickle said. “I had a vision we could grow.”

And it did: from producing pultruded materials in 90-odd shapes to some 2,500 now. The company underwent another ownership change in 1985 when it was bought by Shell Oil, but Tickle and his family gained control in 1993, bringing it under private, local ownership. The company adopted the name Strongwell in the mid 1990s, and was 100 percent owned by the Tickle family by the end of the decade.

Today, Strongwell employs 400 people at the 390,000-square-foot Bristol plant, and has about 700 employees, counting its plants north of Abingdon and in Chatfield, Minn.

Keys to success

Though growth is strong, Tickle said, the company might not be as bulletproof as some of its products. Sales of fiberglass ladder rails, a widely used product, have fallen in tandem with the decline in new construction. But demand for other products has increased.

Case in point: ballistic panels capable of stopping a .45-caliber bullet at a distance of 15 feet.

Tickle said he recently received an order for ballistic shields from Hardwire LLC, a Maryland-based developer of body armor, that numbered in the “tens of thousands.” Most of the shields are destined for Iraq, he said. But not all.

Ballistic panels also are used domestically for, say, a bulletproof guard on a judge’s bench, Tickle said.

Tickle’s showroom is a testament to the company’s diversification. There are examples of skateboard parts, missile tubes, utility poles and cattle prods. There are photographs of Strongwell-supported bridges in Barbados, Chicago and Baltimore.

Tickle also emphasized the light weight of pultruded materials as a key advantage over steel and concrete. Pultruded materials weigh a third to a fifth that of steel. And lighter material saves a company costs when it comes to transporting it to a worksite.

But when asked about his success, Tickle prefers to talk about his hiring practices.

The key, he said, is hiring “talented, good people.”

Asked to elaborate, he said, good people are “smart, honest and hardworking.” And smart, roughly construed, means “I try to hire people who are smarter than me.”

It’s not all subjective at Strongwell. Applicants must take a psychological and an intelligence test – the one a multiple choice personality gauge, and the other an aptitude test for mechanics, math and vocabulary.

Having a tie to Bristol doesn’t hurt an applicant’s chances either, said the Bristol-born Tickle.

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