The company broadened its in-house capabilities to include helium-leak detection, and purchased a CNC vertical machining center, complementing TBI’s conventional The shop employs a dozen people and recently underwent a building expansion for a total of 10,000 square feet, doubling available floor space. On the surface, the business looks far different today than it did only eight years ago. Other metals common in aerospace and defense. “Our mainstay is 0.25 to 1.5 inch,” Christoffersen said, adding that stainless and aluminum make up the bulk of TBI’s work, though the shop does bend plenty of INCONEL® alloy and Using all-electric and hydraulic rotary draw machines, as well as an orbital bending machine for making coil, the shop forms tube between 0.062 and 2 inches in diameter. TBI specializes in small-diameter tube bending.
The previous owner wanted to retire, and seeing an opportunity, Christoffersen bought the business. When Bryan Christoffersen expressed interest in buying the business in 2005, the shop employed just four people.Ĭhristoffersen spent years as an engineer at another firm that made refrigeration equipment for semiconductor production, which happened to use TBI as a principal tube bending provider. (TBI)-from Santa Fe Springs, in the Los Angeles metro area, to Apple Valley, a small community north of San Bernardino. He sold off most divisions to other companies but kept the tube bending operation.Ī little more than two decades ago the owner moved the tube business-Tube Bending Inc. Then in the 1980s and 1990s, the shop’s previous owner began his gradual exit from the business. Of course, back then the job shop was part of an entirely different and larger organization that offered various facets of metal manufacturing, including sheet metal fabrication, machining, and casting.
If those tubes didn’t function properly, Neil Armstrong wouldn’t have survived on the moon.
The shop’s tube bending technicians in the 1950s and 1960s played a critical role. Tube Bending Inc., a Southern California job shop, recently doubled its plant size to 10,000 square feet.Ī small Southern California tube shop has roots going back to the Gemini and Apollo days, when technicians manually bent small tubes designed for astronaut life support backpacks.
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