Bed liner maker picks up.

Byline: Joe Mosley The Register-Guard

There's a new home for the company that has made Eugene a hotbed of the bed liner industry.

Arma Coatings - one of the world's largest manufacturers of spray-on bed liners and application equipment for pickup trucks - has moved about two miles out West 11th Avenue, to a 2.8-acre parcel that will accommodate a major expansion that's expected within a few years.

"For now, it's adequate - it's exactly what we need," company founder and president Charles Hibberd said Tuesday. "But within two years, or 2 1/2 years, we will need to put up a new building on the property."

Arma Coatings was founded by Hibberd in San Diego in 1988. Hibberd sold the company and its headquarters was relocated to Eugene in 1993. He later moved to Eugene to work for the new owner, then repurchased his company in 2001.

The business - which offers application of the spray-on liners to local customers as well as sales of the specialized spray equipment to Arma Coatings dealers around the world - has operated for the past several years from a leased building at 4026 W. 11th Ave.

Hibberd purchased the larger property and existing building at 5555 W. 11th Ave. last December for $424,000, according to Lane County property records.

The 8,700-square-foot building was a former home of the Bunks Plus warehouse, but its interior was refurbished before Arma Coatings completed its move early this month.

Hibberd said Arma Coatings and its polyurethane and polyurea products are in high demand for a wide range of uses that go well beyond bed liners. The company has developed a weatherproofing mix that has been applied to motor home roofs for a local manufacturer, is working with military suppliers on products such as interior liners for armored vehicles and even has coated the insides of water tanks for a local winery.

"Bed liners are the meat and potatoes of our business," Hibberd said. "But there's a huge demand for our technology, because it's solvent-free." The company is now the third- or fourth-largest in its industry in the world, he said.

The products are considered environmentally friendly, he said, because the materials are a mix of two solids that are heated in special equipment and then combined as they pass through a spray gun.

In addition to the company's network of licensed independent dealers - across the United States, as well as in South Africa, Japan and Guam - Arma Coatings has begun to sell equipment to automobile dealerships, which apply bed liners to vehicles in their lots.

"I would expect us, at least on the bed liner side, to double or triple (sales) over the next five years," Hibberd said. He declined to disclose annual sales figures.

Arma Coatings' complete system for applying bed liners - the parts are fabricated and assembled in Eugene - sells for about $35,000. The price for bed liners themselves ranges from $300 to $550, depending on the size of the pickup truck.