Quartet of Saginaw Metal Casting Operations Suppliers to Set Up Shop in Saginaw

---

Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). In March, Corvus Nodular Interests LLC (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan), in a joint venture project with Pumford Construction Company (Kochville Township, Michigan), began sitework on a new $9 million, 240,000 square foot plant of metal construction on the site of the defunct General Motors Powertrain's Nodular Iron plant, which closed in 1986, and was later torn down. The new facility will be located between where the old Nodular plant was, at 2100 Veterans Memorial Parkway, and 2406 Veterans Memorial Parkway, where Saginaw's wastewater treatment plant is located. Construction completion is scheduled for October.

Corvus and Pumford's total investment in the brownfield project will be $60 million, for which they received $4.4 million in tax credits over the next ten years. A brownfield site is a previously-used industrial site that is possibly polluted or otherwise environmentally compromised, and therefore needs a lot of preliminary cleanup in order to comply with local environmental standards. Mechanical design and installation at the new facility is being handled by John E. Green of Zilwaukee, Michigan.

Four tier suppliers of General Motors' Saginaw Metal Casting plant (SMCO) (Plant 1510611), which is located on North Washington, just across the M-13 from the new plant site, will share the new building, which will result in considerable logistics expense savings for General Motors. This project goes in lock-step with that of General Motors Powertrain's SMCO project. General Motors is investing $80 million in SMCO to upgrade the plant for production of cast aluminum engines by means of the lost foam casting method (PEC 180011636). Aluminum engines are increasingly being demanded in the automotive industry because of their lighter weight, as compared to that of traditional steel engines.

All four suppliers will perform various processing operations on the aluminum engine blocks built by SMCO, which plans to have their aluminum engine block lines in production by January 2005.

Enterprise Automotive Systems (EAS) (Warren, Michigan), which has recently changed its name to reflect its expanded capabilities, will be doing engine block machining. EAS engineers and technical specialists are major contributors to the overall development of automotive components. Their expertise ranges from product and prototype design, development, and testing, to advanced quality planning programs and extensive R&D. EAS offers a diversity of manufacturing commodities, both simple and complex, including assembled components, and machined and fabricated forged and cast aluminum, iron, or steel parts. EAS' headquarters and main plant (#1063490) are in Warren, and a second plant is in Saginaw, at 1200 Leon Scott.

B&W of Michigan, a subsidiary of Kitchener, Ontario-based B&W Heat Treating Limited, will be doing the heat treating on SMCO’s engine blocks. B&W Heat Treating has two plants in Kitchener (#2012156), where it operates the largest aluminum processing facilities among heat treaters in Canada, with fixtures for both low-volume and high-volume production.

CMI-Schneible Company, with headquarters and main plant (#1063512) in Holly, Michigan, manufactures pressure vessels, tanks, air pollution equipment, bulk containers, and does custom fabrication and machining and light assembly work. CMI-Schneible will clean the engine blocks as they come from the line at SMCO.

Michigan Production Machining Incorporated (MPM), with headquarters and main plant (#1063264) at 16700 23 Mile Road in Macomb, Michigan (MPM), is a high volume, environmentally-sensitive machining company that supplies partial and finished machined parts to the automotive industry.