Windsor, Conn.-based injection mold maker Burteck LLC plans to relocate this year to a larger building it recently bought for $1.4 million.
The company has outgrown the 15,000-square-foot building it purchased in 2013 and will transition to the 40,330-square-foot facility 6 miles away in Bloomfield, Conn., President Peter Burgess said in a Jan. 26 phone interview. The building is in a 600-acre office park development.
Burgess said he plans to sell or lease the Windsor building.
The company launched in 2010 with two people. Its staff has grown to 30. “I can see us growing to 50, easily,” Burgess said. Sales have averaged $9 million to $12 million in the past couple of years, he added.
The company is expanding to handle more work domestically, Burgess said. Burteck partners with a firm in China that makes some of its molds. The arrangement allows Burteck to accommodate customers that prioritize price. All the molds are inspected and qualified in the U.S., however. The partnership “allows us to have some level of control over pricing and quality,” he added.
“As we’ve grown, we’ve felt more of a push to have work done here,” Burgess said.
Burteck has four injection molding machines, with clamping forces of 100-340 tons, for testing molds.
Sometimes customers will drop ship a new machine directly to Burteck, which is a growing area of business for the company.
“We’ll outfit the machine for the mold,” Burgess said. “It takes the pressure off the customer and puts it on us — we’re better equipped to manage it.”
It will take time for Burteck to be able to accommodate more work. Burgess hopes to have the new site ready to occupy by June. The one-story office building will need to be modified.
In the past year, Burteck has added equipment worth about $1 million, including a five-axis precision milling machine with a robot for high-accuracy, precision machining. The company also has electric discharge machining (EDM) and wire EDM equipment, surface grinders, computerized coordinate measuring machines (CMMs), 3D modeling and simulation software, and other inspection equipment.
Burteck began making molds for liquid silicone rubber (LSR) in 2018, but its focus remains on thermoplastic elastomers, making Class 101 molds for very high production runs. “We’ve been so consumed with our turnkey business,” building production molds as well as complete molding work cells on site, he said.
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