O-Z/Gedney plant celebrates 150 years as oldest malleable iron foundry.

The oldest continually operating malleable iron foundry recently celebrated 150 years of manufacturing castings.

First known as the Malleable Iron Works, the foundry has changed shape and size, but has continually produced malleable iron since it started production on November 24, 1847. The Terryville Foundry was considered a pioneer, as little was known about the process of making malleable iron at the time. The original shop has been described in a local historical text as "just 40 sq ft, with one air furnace and three small annealing kilns, each having 24 pots capacity, all operated by 25 men."

It was founded as the Malleable Iron Works by Andrew Terry in Terryville, Connecticut, the town named after his grandfather, Eli Terry. The shop originally produced parts for the local clock-making business. The name changed in 1860 to the Andrew Terry & Co., but the castings remained the same. In the 1930s, the company began producing cast metal fittings for the electrical industry under the brand name Gedney Electrical Products. These are the parts that still being made today. By the late-1960s, the company was purchased by General Signal, which merged Gedney with O-Z Electrical Manufacturing Co. in 1974.

During the last 50 years, O-Z/Gedney grew beyond the four walls of the Terryville plant, and has since built a sister foundry in Birch Hill, Pennsylvania, a zinc diecasting facility in Lexington, Ohio and a small aluminum foundry in Tulsa.

Since the installation of two cupolas at the turn of the century, not much changed at the foundry until the 1960s, when the company purchased their first Disamatic molding machine and updated the melt operation with electric furnaces. Later, in the early 1970s, the foundry added two similar molding machines.

The foundry had used cupolas for more than 50 years. As the foundry added gray iron to its production, it also modernized its equipment. More recent changes in the foundry came about in 1989 when the company added two ABB melt furnaces, a Mark IV Disamatic, a Junker Autopour, Dietert Sand System Sand Controller and upgraded pouring on the remaining Disa lines - completing the project in 1994. The plant grew in size at the time, with a 200,000 sq ft expansion to accommodate the new equipment.

"We believe we had the second Disamatic in the country," DeMott said. "Some people even tell us we were the first." In the 1960s and 1970s, the company found that using Disamatics were well suited to making small (2-16 oz) thin-walled malleable iron castings.

Although the foundry's mainstay is malleable iron, it started producing some gray iron in the 1980s, DeMott said. The company decided it needed to produce gray iron to augment the malleable iron.

"We wanted to offer a line of conduit boxes like our competitor," DeMott said. "We chose gray iron over ductile because it was the industry standard."

The company also built a 50,000 sq ft addition for material holding lines in 1994. Most of the additions at the Terryville plant were built around the original shop, which was destroyed by fire and rebuilt in 1897, DeMott said.

Another recent change at the foundry is the philosophy behind the operation. The company implemented an SPC system in the last two years and has increased the training opportunities available to employees, DeMott said. Weekly process control meetings are held and consultants are brought in to train workers on a monthly basis, he added.

"We used to have experienced people who could come in and smell the air and tell us if we were making good castings," DeMott said. "Our process control is now based solely on data."