How often do you hear about a father and two sons enrolling and attending college together to study metal finishing?  "Never," you say? Well, how about a father and two sons leaving school and starting a business together based on the technology they learned in school?  That one probably rates an "almost never," but that's exactly what Chet Krygier, Sr. and his sons John and Chet Jr. did.
    "Actually what started us was an Advanced Career Training over at the Rockwell Autonetics Division when I was in high school" says John Krygier, vp at Fullerton, CA's Kryler Corporation.  "They taught metal plating and finishing, so I went once a week for a couple of hours at night for training.  Then I told my father and brother about it, and they said, 'Let's see if you can pursue that.' And so I did.
     "In 1974 the father and two sons enrolled at Cerritos College to study metal plating.  "Cerritos was a technical school, " Krygier says, "and they had a small plating shop there and held classes.  We attended the college for three years, and when we finished, my brother and I worked at two different metal finishing companies for a while.  In 1977 we started Kryler Corporation.  We've been at it ever since."
     The family started off as a hard-chrome plating shop.  "It was a small shop," Krygier says.  "A 1200 square-foot unit.  We stayed there approximately 7 years before we moved to our current 18,000 square-foot facility.  We've been here ever since.  Today we have 37 employees serving a lot of different customers." 

Customer Inspired Growth and Change
     In the beginning Kryler worked only for commercial markets, Krygier recalls.  "We did strictly chrome plating until we got our first aerospace customer." he says.  "We got our first approval from Rockwell, and then McDonnell Douglas, and that really opened a lot of doors for us.  They needed hard-chrome plating, and they had a hard time doing it in house, so they jobbed it out.  After a while they said, 'You know, a lot of these parts need to be cadmium plated, too.  Can you do that for us?' So we thought it over and put in CAD plating.  Then they said, 'We do a lot of aluminum, too.  You guys interested in doing anodizing and priming?'  So, we put that in.  Basically, we've grown just by responding to our cusotmers' needs.  That's probably the best way to grow."

Chet Krygier, Sr., middle, and John Krygier, left, and Chet Krygier Jr. discuss scheduling of parts to be heat treated in their Blue M oven, shown in the background.  Kryler Copr. specializes in chrome and CAD plating, anodizing and priming, and OD grinding.

Tough Niche
     Since those early days, the company has continued to specialize in its three main service areas.  "We still do hard chrome plating, we do CAD plating and we do anodizing and priming," says company president Chet Krygier, Sr.  "That's the bulk of our business.  We get customers from the east coast, from Canada, from England, from anywhere our kind of service is needed.  Some of our customers tell us it's hard to find a chrome shop as reliable as we are.  Maybe it's because we specialize in  aerospace, where our work can't be sloppy, but we've been told we're one of the best shops in the business.  We do perfect chrome plating."
     "What perfect means is that the chrome adheres tightly and there's no edge build up on the substrate," John Krygier explains.  "We have a machine shop where we make our own tooling designed to prevent build up.  Chrome plating builds up on edges real easily, and it's a nightmare to grind those edges once it's built up high because it wears off the grinding wheels really quickly.  So we spend the time and the money to fabricate tooling that will take the chrome off those edges, which allows us to offer very high quality plating with a fast turnaround."
     "Hard chrome plating is a tough niche," Krygier, Sr. says, "but we're good at it, and our customers know it.  Basically we've become a one-stop shop for chrome, CAD, anodizing and grinding."  Kryler currently chrome plate parts up to 36" long and anodizes and primes parts up to 72" long.  "We can chrome plate just about any ferrous material and quite a few stainless steels," Krygier says.  "And some of the exotics like Inconel."
     "We have magnetic inspection, and we've added a stress relieving oven," adds Krygier, Sr.  My son Chet Jr. is our quality control manager, and he makes certain that the parts coming in the door are what the customer says they are, and the parts leaving here are what the customer wants them to be."

New Customer Need: Grinding
     About 7 years ago Kryler decided to add another service to their line up.  "We plate quite a few pistons from the 737 and different Boeing aircraft," John Krygier says.  "And we realized that the customers were picking up the plated parts and then sending them out to another shop for grinding.  Which meant they were losing time handling, so we decided, 'Hey, let's take a stab at it and put in our own grinding.'  That way our customers come in once, have their parts processed and pick up a completed job.  Faster turnaround, less handling, less expense."
     Kryler moved into grinding with baby steps, however. "We bought a good quality Japanese semi-automatic OD grinder." Krygier, Sr. says.  "We started out grinding for only one customer, Parker Hannifin, which was good at the time.  We didn't have a lot of experience, so John personally got involved until we knew what we were doing."
     "Over time we added customers," John Krygier says,"and we got good at OD grinding. Basically most of the parts we chrome and grind are pistons. We chrome a lot of different parts from different customers, but we have a few customers in particular that send us only pistons. We OD grind the pistons between centers with tolerances ranging between .0002" and .002". We still do some commercial work where the tolerance requirements are lower."
     Krygier says his biggest problem with grinding was finding grinders to do the work.  "I hired a few grinders over the years." he reports, "but the truth is they didn't meet our expectations, so I talked to Dad and my brother and said, 'Let's automate.' In December of 2008 we bought a Jones & Shipman Suprema Easy CNC OD grinder from Ellison Technologies.

Close up view of the Jones & Shipman Suprema Easy
CNC OD grinder in operation at Kryler Corporation.

Grinding the Easy Way
Krygier says he wanted a grinder that he could learn fast, that would be easy to use and that would allow him to do both manual and CNC grinding.
     "We were limited by our manual grinder to 24" length," he says, "I wanted something with more capacity, so we went to Westec 2008, and that's where we saw the Jones & Shipman Suprema Easy at the Ellison booth. That machine is outstanding. For the same price as other grinders we almost double the capacity. With that one we can handle parts up to 14" diameter and up to 40.5" long. It has both manual and automatic modes, very high precision and it's totally easy to use. We bought the floor demo model from Ellison and took delivery last December."
     Along with the grinder, Kryler got a technician from England, where the grinder is produced. "Their technician, Ralph, came here for 5 days and worked with me and it was great," Krygier recalls. "Of course, you have to know how to grind to start with, but that 5 days of training was all we needed. It's so easy, you don't need any programming experience and the installation was a piece of cake. We just put it in a corner, plugged it in and it was ready to go. It's really an amazing machine."

Customers Jumping in the Boat 
     Krygier says the new Jones & Shipman grinder has already had an impact on business.  "We had customers waiting for us to handle their grinding work," he says, "which is why we bought the machine. In the last two months we've probably had 4 or 5 Boeing reps from all across the country come to look at the machine. We're already running the machine 2 shifts, 16 hours a day. To be honest, I'll never buy another manual grinder. If anybody wants to do OD grinding, Jones & Shipman is the way to go. It can't get any easier."

As Seen in the August/September 2009 issue of CNC WEST.