Bourn & Koch Celebrates 40 Years of Building American Machine Tools

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Located in the heart of the Rockford, Illinois, industrial zone, Bourn & Koch has been manufacturing new machine tools and refurbishing its legacy in the United States for more than 40 years. The company’s production machine tool shop includes over two dozen American-made horizontal boring machines, gear manufacturing machines, turning machines, grinders, and milling machines divided into six main manufacturing departments — milling/boring, turning, hobbing, grinding, scraping, and electrical assembly. Other key departments within Bourn & Koch’s 147,000 square feet of manufacturing space include in-house repair, quality/inspection, engineering, shipping and receiving, sales and training, and a large stockroom with 600,000 spare part inventory.

Bourn & Koch remanufactures, retrofits, redesigns, rebuilds, reconditions, and repairs worn out equipment to keep “the machines that built American industry” running for decades to come. The company has completed over 2,500 of these projects since 1975, often incorporating new technology into older machines, making improvements in accuracy and reliabilities superior to the original OEM tolerances.

Bourn & Koch also manufactures several lines of new, American machine tools in Rockford, including vertical turning centers, vertical grinding machines, surface grinders, horizontal boring machines, volume production machines, and gear hobbers, as well as gear shapers, gear grinders, and special gear machines. These new machines are sold under the brand names Bourn & Koch, Fellows, Motch, Springfield, Blanchard, and DeVlieg. Over the last four decades, through numerous acquisitions, Bourn & Koch has become the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for a long list of well-known USA-made legacy machine tools, including these classic brands. As an OEM, Bourn & Koch has all of the original documentation for every brand they own, so the new machines built by Bourn & Koch are an improvement on the time-tested designs of each legacy machine tool brand.

The company’s production equipment list includes a remanufactured Gray floor HBM, which is a very large capacity horizontal boring machine used to machine Bourn & Koch’s new machine tool bases. There is also a large capacity Fellows 1280-300 CNC gear shaper, a remanufactured Mattison 36 x 144 large reciprocating horizontal surface grinder, and a Blanchard No. 11 vertical rotary surface grinder. Rounding out its equipment list are many more American-made machine tools, including remanufactured DeVlieg horizontal boring mills; numerous Barber-Colman gear hobbers and Bourn & Koch CNC gear hobbers; numerous Hendey and Monarch horizontal lathes; Arter, Bryant and Norton grinders; and CNC milling machines and small Bridgeport mills. All of Bourn & Koch’s remanufactured machines were done in-house. A 35-ton crane with 10-ton auxiliary capacity and 30 feet under the hook in their high-bay assembly area; two 20-ton cranes (one with a five-ton auxiliary) in the main assembly area; and up to 4,000-pound cranes in each assembly bay further demonstrates its large-scale manufacturing capacity.

Bourn & Koch’s 60-plus person Rockford staff includes electrical and mechanical engineers, precision repair technicians, dedicated quality inspectors, dedicated stockroom employees, and a full customer care specialist team that includes a service coordinator and senior applications engineer who help Bourn & Koch to respond to customers quickly and accurately.

The company’s growing staff is also comprised of factory-trained service technicians, precision machine tool assemblers, and numerous precision machine tool builders experienced in the lost art of hand-scraping. Bourn & Koch also hosts classes on the basics of hand-scraping at its Rockford facility in an effort to pass this important skill along to future generations and to ensure proper lubrication and alignment of machines. Further evidence of Bourn & Koch’s interest in educating America’s future machine tool builders and operators are the internships it hosts for local college students during the summer.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: bourn-koch.com