2018cnc6-7

CNC WEST June/July 2018 www.CNC-West.com 23 T he oil business has its ups and downs and it’s no secret that Bakersfield, Ca. knows this bet- ter than most. Kern County is a large producer of oil in the USA and for nearly four decades Swaim & Sons Manufacturing has been down hole with them. Oil pumps are what they do well, pun intended. After ten years working for a local pump company Bill Swaim saw a need for an independently owned sucker rod manufacturer in Bakersfield, Ca. In 1979, at the ripe age of 30 he opened Swaim Machine Shop to service the area’s top industry, oil. “Haven’t been in business as long as there has been oil in Bakersfield, but this October will be 40 years.” jokes Bill Swaim. “When you see pumping units going up and down, at the bottom of that rod is the pumping unit. Bottom hole pump parts are what we do best. In forty years of business we still make the same part pumps that have been around since the 30’s. We’ve been to the moon and back and these pump systems have remained pretty much the same.” Materials have changed and the machines used to manufacture the pump parts have grown more sophisticated, but in essence the pumps have remained mostly unchanged. The pumps just work and always have. The big- gest revolution to the Bakersfield oil industry has come from fracking and steam enhancement. The oil in Bakersfield is tar like, so without new ways to harvest it the field would have dried up decades ago. Refineries bring in hundreds of railroad cars of oil from North Da- kota to mix with it to make it useable. At the end of the day it still needs to be pumped from the ground. “Kern County is 3rd in the nation in oil production so we have a lot of local customers, but the reality is that there are very few of us left in the business so we’ve be- come more of a global supplier.” adds Lance Swaim, sales- man and son in the Swaims & Sons. “We have an online ordering system that notifies sales, production and man- agement of a sale.” Swaim & Sons sell directly to consum-