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Jaf-Co in on `Extreme Makeover' project
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Action Equipment finds a new home in Newberg |
The company erects an 80,000 square foot building on
Hayes Street, improving work flow and safety |
By David
Sale, Newberg
Graphic reporter
E-mail David at
dsale@eaglenewspapers.com
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After 40 years in business, Action
Equipment has moved into a new building in Newberg, tripling the
size of its production area.
“We briefly considered other sites, but the city has been very
cooperative and wanted us to stay,” said company co-owner Dan LaVine.
“My brother and I are both George Fox grads and been in the
community for a long time — we like it here.”
Located at 2800 Hayes Street, the new building offers 80,000 square feet
of fabrication and storage space — and much-needed elbow room for
the company’s 25 workers, according to Kathy LaVine, human resources
director for the company.
“It was so crowded at
the old place that we had to run two shifts, because there wasn’t
enough room to get all our workers on the floor,” she said. “Now,
we’re able to build twice as many machines as before, and we’re
looking to hire more people. But more important is safety — we’re
able to work better and without hiring outside contractors.”
The extra work space also allowed the company to install a new
paint booth to deliver its equipment with a finished look.
After occupying a building in Newberg’s Industrial Park, company
owners Andy and Dan LaVine decided to build from scratch rather than
leasing an industrial facility. Construction was completed April 28.
“We wanted to design the space to facilitate the material flow — a
long and narrow work floor,” Andy LaVine said. “We also had to embed
steel beams in the concrete for our test stands. When you
manufacture vibratory equipment, you have to take those forces into
account.”
Action Equipment’s stock-in-trade is mechanical screeners and
separators, used in a variety of applications.
“The Vibra-Snap is one of our newest product lines — it has a
flexible screen that snaps back and forth, making it especially
useful for wet or sticky material,” said Brian Bonham, marketing
director for the company.
“Filtering sand, soil and dirt are popular applications — like a
golf course, for instance, that wants a fine-grained sand in its
traps,” LaVine added.
The company has also recently begun producing an air separator,
using a stream of air in place of a plastic screen to separate
materials.
“It’s our newest product. Most of our machines sort by size and
this one sorts by density, so it’s a little bit of a change,” Bonham
said. |
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From
July 25,
2007, Newberg Graphic
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