Excellence Without Exception
Our mission statement truly does describe the essence of our company. You can’t be a world-class gear company without caring for the customer’s needs, staying on top of the newest technology, training your employees efficiently and instilling passion at each step. Our skill at manufacturing fine and medium pitch custom gears is unmatched. This is no brag, it is a fact, borne out by our customers, who include many other gear companies, who look to Forest City Gear for assistance.
We work closely with our customers and provide innovative ways to improve their product. When they bring a sketch of a gear, we interact with their engineers to create a finished product that completely fulfills their needs. We then constantly test and review the gears at each stage of their production to make sure they fit our standards and our customer’s spec.
By always having the latest equipment on the floor, Forest City Gear is prepared for any idea. Every year, we are able to make gears faster and more precisely. At the end of 2008, we spent $6 million on the purchase of new capital equipment for gear manufacturing and nearly matched that level in 2009. Even in this distressed economy, we realize that if we do not purchase new machines, we would be disappointing our customers and ourselves because they would not receive the true Forest City Gear promise to deliver state-of-the-art technology. We strive to make our company more than ready to meet all challenges in gearmaking.
Several industries have long recognized Forest City Gear as a leader in gear manufacturing. Our gears are used in applications as diverse as the Mars Rover, every Indy 500 race car in the starting field, BMW/Oracle racing yachts and the A1A Abrams tank. By taking extra steps to improve our factory, we were recently awarded the ISO 13485 medical certification, the only gearmaker currently carrying this rating. This allows our gears to be used in the most advanced clinical machinery and orthopedic/prosthetic devices that require extremely accurate and reliable gear mechanisms. Without having the latest gearmaking machines and our skilled Forest City Gear employees, as well as production and quality protocols, this accomplishment would not have been possible.
To insure our employees are familiar with all our advanced machines, we send our teams to different gear schools, offered by Gleason, Koepfer, the American Gear Manufacturers Association hands-on school and the Universal Technical Systems gear engineering courses. We take the time to educate our employees about how to read and understand technical graphs and charts, as well as operate today’s most sophisticated CNC machines. Everyone in the company is invited to see the innovations at IMTS, the International Manufacturing Technology Show, every two years, to further enhance their skill level.
In 1955, Forest City Gear was founded by Stetler and Evelyn Young, parents of Fred Young, our current CEO. Our company has succeeded because we not only meet our customers’ expectations, we exceed them, every day on every job. Our commitment to our customers, whether the job is large or small, is exactly the same. By fulfilling our commitments to quality, service and fair price, we know our customers can rely on us to give them excellent results and we do.
For more information of Forest City Gear, contact saless@forestcitygear.com or call us at 815-623-2168. Visit us at forestcitygear.com