Machined parts shop’s formula for success

In 1995, Tom Fares Sr. left his job managing an Ohio foundry and bought a three-person machine shop. During the next 10 years, he grew the business, hired 18 people and was looking to build or buy a bigger facility when his real estate agent told him an investor was interested in purchasing a manufacturing company.

After talking to the investor and his management team to make sure that Fares’ current employees would keep their jobs, Fares agreed. However, the business eventually ran into troubles and closed.

Fares’ son, Tom Jr., was about to graduate from Ohio University with a degree in mechanical engineering. The elder Fares figured that the two could work more closely with engineering firms and focus on designing and building custom equipment for the area’s steel mills and tire manufacturers. TNT Custom Equipment Inc. was born.

A machine for the dewatering industry was fabricated, assembled, wired and tested at TNT Custom Equipment. Image courtesy of TNT Custom Equipment

However, it didn’t work out as planned. Originally, the shop was going to do only design work and equipment assembly but quickly became involved in machining out of necessity. The machinery TNT was building sometimes had drawing-related errors or machining mistakes on parts from other shops. TNT had to tear apart entire machines to send one or two pieces to be fixed. TNT soon realized that it needed significant machining capability so it could fix in-house any issues that may arise during assembly and do so quickly and cost-effectively for its engineering design customers.

The company’s 45,000-sq.-ft. facility is in Stow, Ohio, a small town about an hour’s drive south of Cleveland. Thanks to the extreme variety of work TNT does, its equipment list is eclectic. From the dozen or so Hurco CNC lathes and machining centers that Fares Jr. began buying in response to the shop’s increased need for machined parts to a 360″ Giddings & Lewis horizontal boring mill to several 60″ Webster & Bennett vertical turret lathes, there’s little that TNT can’t tackle.