In nature there's always a pecking order. Ditto in the business world. When La Verne, CA’s Dow Precision Hydraulics, Inc. got started in 1967, it's position in the business food chain was about equivalent to plankton in the seafood chain. You know, little fish eat the plankton, bigger fish eat them, the sharks and other predators eat them. But sometimes, in business at least, the plankton undergoes a transformation and gets too big to be eaten.

“I guess that’s what happened to us,” says Dow president, Richard Dow. “My father, Gerald Dow, started the company in our garage in 1967 with one Sunnen honing machine and our ping-pong table for a work bench. Now we have 95 employees. We operate from 23,000 square feet in two buildings, and at present there are only about three or four companies in the country that can do the kind of work we do. Because of my dad’s hard work and vision, we not only survived, we have managed to climb that very competitive food chain.”

Dow says his father, who was an expert lap fitter, knocked on doors during the day and did the work at night.

“He worked long, brutal hours,” he says, “but in the end it paid off. “He got some special tools to allow him to use the Sunnen honing machine for ID cylindrical lapping, as well as honing. There have never been very many lapfitters around, so he was able to find work. My mom used to deliver finished parts in a little Datsun station wagon.”

Within a year, Dow’s father had enough business to move out of his garage.

“He grew very slowly at first,” Dow says, “but dad was was fairly well known, so once he got established, he did pretty well. Lapping is probably the most precision kind of work there is, and it was something people needed. By the time I went to work for him at age 14, that was 1971, we already had three or four employees.”

Service Business

Dow Precision continued to grow steadily, but according to Dow it remained way down in the food chain for years.

“For most of our years we were sub to the subs to the subcontractors for the primes,” he says. “We were strictly a service business doing honing or grinding or lapping on valve parts customers sent to us. After a time we started doing hydraulic testing for leakage and force and movement. Tolerances on the valves we work on are in the millionths, and they go into hydraulic units, usually in aircraft, so they have to work. Dad got an old test stand so we could offer testing services, too, but for a long time that’s where our involvement ended.”

Dow’s father, who was a Korean war veteran, became ill in 1972, but he was a fighter, and he had a vision he passed on first to Richard and then to his younger son, Ryan.
“I guess because of his illness, he tried to pass on everything he could to me and to my brother,” Dow says. “He taught me to hone from the day I walked into the shop. He taught me his values of hard work and self-discipline. But mostly he gave me and my brother his vision of taking the company from a pure service business, from simply honing and grinding parts supplied by others, to producing and assembling the parts ourselves from scratch.”

Dow took control of the business at age 25.

“Dad was too ill by then, so the job fell to me,” he says. “He passed away four years later, but his vision lives on. Ryan came on board full time a couple of years later and together we have begun the transition to fulfill that vision.”

Moving Up the Food Chain

In order to fabricate parts from scratch, Dow needed machining equipment.
“Ryan, who is six years younger than me, came to me in the mid ‘80s and said, ‘Okay, if we want to make parts, we need to start buying equipment.’ So I went out and spent $3,000 on a little turret lathe. That purchase was kind of like dipping my toe in the water to see what it was like. I was scared to death. A year later we bought an SNK CNC turning center. We’ve been buying equipment ever since. Both our facilities are pretty full of equipment now.”

Dow now operates CNC mills, lathes, grinders, honing machines and wire EDMs and provides any combination of services their customers need.

“If they want just honing and grinding, we give it to them,” Dow says. “If they want us to fabricate the parts, assemble and test them, we do that, too.”

Dow was not content to stay so far down in the pecking order, so he and his brother made some bold moves that changed the way the company operated.

“Once I had the equipment to fabricate parts, I basically looked at a lot of my customers and said to myself, ‘Forget you guys!’ We jumped over the sub subs and moved up the chain. We told them, ‘Hey, look! This is what we can do for you. Look what you can get from a single source.’ They liked that, you know, because it was about then that the big companies started trying to get rid of a lot of their high-priced overhead. By offering them a single source for fabrication, lapping, honing, grinding and testing at decent shop rates, we solved a lot of their problems.”

Big Service Package

Today, because of the strategic and tactical business moves of the brothers, Dow Precision Hydraulics has become a big fish in its particular niche.

“Right now we specialize in complete fabrication of spool and sleeve hydraulic components,” Dow says. “We do lapping and fitting of hydraulic lap assemblies. We have a very modern testing facility. We do optical trim grinding for hydraulic flow, plus we’re an FAA Certified Hydraulic Repair station. We make to order several products for our customers, including lap assemblies, sub assemblies, servo valves and control valves.”

Equipped for Production

Dow has come a long way since that first $3,000 turret lathe purchase.

“We’re very sophisticated in our manufacturing now,” Dow says. “We have one-man manufacturing cells, we have advanced turning, milling, grinding, wire EDM and quality control equipment. We divide our grinding into two types: production and finish. For our finish grinding we use Studer grinders located in our warehousing facility. For our production grinding, where the heavy-duty production work gets done, we opted to buy Supertec grinders. We were looking for production grinders that would give us the kind of precision and reliability we needed, but without a huge price tag. A friend of ours in Reno said he had Supertec grinders, and that he was very happy with them. We respected his opinion, so we bought four, two CNCs and two not CNC controlled. So far they’ve been great.”

Dow says that many of his customers want just-in-time delivery, so they produce spools and sleeves ahead of time, and transport them to their inventory facility for safekeeping until they’re needed.

“We don’t want the final finishes damaged in transport,” he explains, “so we do it that way. “We don’t finish grind the parts until we get a request for them from a customer. We put the Supertecs in the production line because they do a great job there, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be used in the finishing process. In fact, in the near future we’re planning to move one of them over to the finishing facility to work alongside the Studers.”

Next Steps

Dow and brother Ryan are not yet satisfied with their situation.

“We haven’t quite achieved my father’s vision,” he says, “but we’re getting close. We’re still doing only part of the process for our customers, but in the near future we intend to do a lot more. We’re setting up our second facility to do just that. What we really want is to be a one-stop shop for our customers, where they can send us a spec and get back a finished assembly. We’ll be ready for that in less than a year.”

—30—