After 80 years in business and 50 years in Emporia, Sauder Custom Fabrication has a lot to be tankful for.
That’s not a typo. Sauder makes and repairs steel tanks on a big scale, the multi-ton monsters that might end up in an oil refinery or a chemical manufacturing company. The company’s products can and do wind up anywhere in the world, from Coffeyville to Korea. And its future looks pretty good.
“We’re seeing opportunity that is almost mind-numbing,” said Dale Davis, Sauder’s president and chief executive officer. “Our projects are being stacked up through about the next four or five years in the future. There are huge expansion plans on the drawing board for almost every refinery in the country.”
And if Aaron Sauder had been in better health, it might not have happened.
Turning to tanks
Back in 1926, Aaron Sauder had a small undertaking business and furniture store in Madison. But while business was doing well, Sauder was having some health problems.
“His doctor suggested that he needed to get outdoors and work outside and he’d be in a lot better health,” said Bob Sauder, Aaron’s son and a company officer for many years. “So he went into the tank business.”
It was good timing. The area was going through an oil boom and every drilling rig had to have a water supply tank. The Sauder Tank Co. was one of seven that started up in Madison, selling redwood tanks and bolted tanks (as opposed to welded ones, which came along later).
Bob Sauder was born the same year the company started and can still remember his father coming home after working in the oily sludge that came with the business.
“He’d come home, clean up, have dinner and then go back to the office and keep the books,” he said. “He worked very hard, he really did. Back then, the work ethic was very strong.”
He came to know the mess quite well himself when he joined Sauder Tank in 1948. Every Saturday, Bob Sauder would go out with a more experienced worker and help replace the bottom of old oil tanks ... which meant dealing with the muck inside.
“It’s called bottom settlings,” he said. “It’s like bad-smelling, filthy mud. There’d be at least six inches in there and we’d have to shovel it out.”
By the 1950s, Sauder Tank was a long-established part of Madison. But it had also reached the limit of what it could do there. The company needed more space, especially because it was going to start doing custom work. It needed a better transportation setup, including a railroad link
And then Emporia made the company an offer it would not refuse.
Coming to town
Emporia had been thinking about growth, too. A newly created “Committee of 50” had been working on recruiting new industries to Emporia, to secure the city’s future. Its first success would be Sauder Tank, which announced its move in 1955 and opened the Emporia plant in 1956. Bob Sauder was the general manager and vice president.
“We know that Emporians will be proud to have the Sauder people as neighbors,” chamber of commerce president Frank Warren said.
One of the people who helped build the plant back then was Davis.
“I was out of high school and working on the farm, and Dad thought I was under-employed,” Davis said. “So he asked if I wanted to work construction for three weeks. As it happened, the construction lasted at least three months, but I was starting to like it.”
Davis ended up joining the plant as a welder.
Business was up and down at first, Bob Sauder said. The plant was just so big, that it was difficult to sell everything that could be produced. One huge breakthrough for the company came in 1962, when it was contracted to build 13 sets of tanks for missile sites around Wichita. One of the tanks weighed about 38 tons.
“It was very ambitious for us to take this order,” Bob Sauder said. “I realized what a maximum effort was going to be required. And if we were lucky enough to build these things, we had no good way to move them. We had no way to shape the metal parts. It had so many big challenges.”
Even painting the things was a tall order, requiring about 70 tons of paint. But once the company committed itself, it didn’t have a choice.
“We got a letter from one of the officers in charge of the base, who reminded me that under the contract, if the manufacturer could not supply the tanks, they had the option to go elsewhere and charge it to us,” Bob Sauder said. “When I came home that day, my wife looked at me and said ‘Don’t you feel well?’”
It took hours of work and more than a little ingenuity. But not only did the company pull it off, it drew a compliment from the same officer who had sent the letter.
“That was probably the real challenge that made us start being a fabricator that could handle these things,” Bob Sauder said.
The company became Sauder Industries in the ’60s and began getting into the industrial furnace business. And then one customer wanted a furnace that could stand 2,400 degree temperatures — several times hotter than the company had managed before.
“Foolishly, we took the order,” Bob Sauder laughed.
The limiting factor had always been the stainless steel fasteners, which couldn’t handle that kind of heat. Bob Sauder ended up developing a product called Pyro-Bloc, that could take the heat and buried the fastener inside, where it would be protected.
“That’s the product that probably gave me more joy than anything,” Bob Sauder said. “It was a lot of fun.”
Changing hands
Bob Sauder stayed with the company until 2000. But the Sauder family sold ownership to the publicly-held Alaska Interstate in 1969. By then, Davis said, the company had grown from its initial 25 employees to about 150 or 175 workers.
The company was sold again in the early ’80s and began to split off its various divisions. The Pyro-Bloc was sold to Babcock and Wilcox. The industrial furnace division was relocated to Houston. But the vessel fabrication division stayed in Emporia, reincorporating as Sauder Custom Fabrication. Its president was Davis, who bought the company in 1986 along with Robert Laflen and a group of key employees.
In the early 2000s, the company hit hard times. A strong dollar put the company at a disadvantage in international markets, and then the national economy hit a slump following the Sept. 11 attacks. At one point, the company had cut back to 36 employees as several refineries shelved any expansion plans they may have had.
“We’re seeing work now that should have been produced four years ago,” Davis said.
Now, with business on the rebound, the only limiting factor is how many people can be trained to do the work, a process that can take three to four years.
Because Sauder does custom work, Davis said, the mindset tends to be more like building Rolls Royces than building Chevrolets — every tank is unique and takes time to do right. The exception to that pace comes in the repair work that Sauder does for some customers.
“When people have equipment that’s broken down, they have to have it fixed almost immediately,” Davis said. “So you have to have a group of people that can react with lightning quickness, while the rest of us are building Rolls-Royces.”
Both Davis and Sauder agreed that the plant’s relationship with Emporia has been a good one.
“It’s been a good move for us,” Sauder said. “We’ve had our ups and downs, but through it all, it has worked out very well.”