Expand? Now?
Yep, Astro Machine Works is going to do just that.
Although there's a financial crisis nationally, there's a financial upturn at the Ephrata company, said president Eric Blow.
"It's a crazy time to be doing an expansion, isn't it? But our business trends, knock on wood, are very good right now," he said.
"These are trying times, but we're doing well — very well. We're working hard to stay that way."
Within two weeks, the 470 Wenger Drive firm will break ground on a $2 million addition that will lead to five to 10 new jobs. The project will be finished in the first quarter of 2009.
"We literally cannot put another machine in this plant safely. We're kind of locked here until we can get this plant up and spread our wings," said Blow.
Astro, which builds custom machinery, assemblies and parts for Fortune 500 industries, will construct 13,000 square feet next to its current facility of 26,000 square feet.
The firm will move its assembly and welding operations into the new building and use the space it occupied in its present facility to enlarge its machining operations.
Then, a year or two later, Astro will construct another 13,000 square feet. That will bring Astro's production facilities to double their current size.
(Astro also has 10,000 square feet of warehouse space on Fulton Street, Ephrata.)
Blow, a machinist who co-founded Astro with three partners in 1984, said the firm serves food processing, energy, aerospace, pharmaceutical and other industrial customers.
It produces an array of machines, parts and assemblies, ranging from candy-making and cookie-making machines to tools used to maintain nuclear-power plants and to material-handling devices for aircraft makers.
All are made to customer specifications.
"We have Fortune 500 companies giving us a stack of drawings and saying, 'Can you build this?'" said Blow, 47, a Lititz native and resident.
Astro can and does. That skill is boosting sales from $8 million last year to a projected $9 million this year.
Sales are predicted to keep rising at a 12-to-15 percent clip for the next three to five years, he said, due to Astro's diverse customer base and its effort to add customers in growth industries such as energy.
Maintaining that rate of sales increases, said Blow, would enable the 48-employee firm to double its size in five years.
Staff writer Tim Mekeel can be reached at tmekeel@LNPnews.com or 481-6030.
