A contract manufacturer of rubber parts since 1967, S&H Rubber also provides extruded and stamped parts to a variety of customers.
By Mark Shortt
S&H Rubber is a custom manufacturer of rubber parts that has been building-to-print for 57 years, using its team’s knowledge and experience to make tight-tolerance, high quality parts consistently and efficiently. At its 10,000-square-foot facility in Fullerton, California, S&H employs molding (including compression and transfer molding), extrusion, and stamping processes to make components such as seals, gaskets, grommets, vibration dampeners, boots, and bellows.
The company also offers design and material selection support and is certified to the ISO 9001:2015 and AS9100D quality management system standards. S&H Rubber serves customers in the aerospace, automotive, fluid transfer, and food and beverage industries, among others.
“We’re a job shop for rubber parts, so we get all types of customers,” said Mike Haney, the company’s president, in an interview with Design-2-Part. “But generally, they’re someone who can’t find it off the shelf. If you’ve looked in distributors, or your local hardware store, or your own manufacturing facility, and if you can’t find a rubber part to meet your needs, then you need to have it custom made. That’s when they come to us—they need a custom-made rubber part.”
Most of all, Haney is proud that the company’s customers consider S&H Rubber to be easy to work with. “We answer the phone, we’re responsive to requests, and we welcome customers to our shop to see their parts made,” he said. “We’ve been building to print for 57 years, providing consistent quality.”
Mike Haney took time out to talk with Design-2-Part recently, sharing his insights on S&H Rubber’s manufacturing capabilities, the ease of its relationships with customers, and some of the trends he sees as driving the demand for custom rubber parts. Following is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Design-2-Part: How did S&H Rubber get started as a company?
Mike Haney: I’m actually a third generation rubber guy. My grandfather was president of a large rubber company in Brea, California, and my Dad was working there through high school and out of high school. Then they decided that they would start S&H Rubber in 1967 because the company in Brea would send them their overflow work—they were so busy. So that’s how S&H started, by taking the overflow work from a larger rubber company.
I started working for the company in the late ’80s. I worked summer jobs there in high school, and then in college. I graduated college in the ’90s, and I’ve been working at S&H Rubber ever since.
D2P: How have you seen S&H Rubber grow and change during your time with the company?
MH: That’s an interesting one, because in so many ways, it’s the same—as they say, “nothing new under the sun.” But in one way, we’re certainly more efficient. I can say that because back in the ’90s, we were running three shifts. And we currently run one shift. So, we’re putting one-third the labor into the parts, and yet we’ve more than doubled in revenue since then.
We’ve also grown in capacity. We used to have three buildings, and now we have two, and so we have two-thirds the amount of space, and again, we’ve more than doubled our revenue over the years. We’re bursting at the seams and busy, but somehow, we’re producing more than double what we did way back when, using one-third the labor and two-thirds the space.
D2P: The need for the custom parts you provide cuts across pretty much all industries, doesn’t it?
MH: Yes, absolutely. It could be from an entrepreneur who is just developing a new bicycle grip, to a golf grip, to a back massage tool. We’ve seen it all. It could be an entrepreneur working in their garage who just has an idea, all the way up to a giant aerospace company who has a highly sophisticated engineering team that may have developed a hydraulic system for an airplane. They may need some type of protective boot to cover a cylinder.
So, you get a wide spectrum: a guy who’s come in and just has an idea—even a sketch on a napkin for a back massage tool, to a [an aerospace engineer] who comes with a fully dimensioned drawing. They know exactly what they want, and they just need a contract manufacturer like S&H Rubber to make it.
D2P: S&H provides three main rubber manufacturing services—molding, extrusion, and stamping. Relatively speaking, how much do you use one process versus another?
MH: I would say that molding rubber parts is our core competency. It’s what we started doing in 1967 and it continues to represent the largest part of our revenue. It represents about 70 percent of our revenue. Extrusion is probably 25 percent, and then stamping is about 5 percent of our revenue.
Molding, as our core competency, has led us to get into the other capabilities–extrusion and stamping—with our existing customers, who like doing business with us. We grow with our existing customers. They come to us when they need a part made, and sometimes they’d come with one and we’d say, ‘This really lends itself to the extrusion process.’ They would say, ‘Oh, I wish you did that.’ You hear that enough times over the years, and you realize, ‘We should really develop this capability.’ That’s how we got into extrusion and stamping.
D2P: Could you give a couple of examples of the types of parts that are made from those processes—molding, extrusion, and stamping?
MH: One example is the aerospace boot I mentioned. There were some military aircraft that were being parked in a desert. It was discovered that high winds and sandstorms were hitting the cylinders, so they needed a protective boot to cover those cylinders.
So, they design it, they come to us, we look at it and we say, ‘You can’t stamp it because it’s a complex shape. It doesn’t lend itself to extrusion—it needs to be molded.” So, we figure out how many they want, and then we decide that the mold needs to be a one-cavity mold because they need only dozens or hundreds of parts a year. If they were going to need thousands of parts a year, we would need a larger, multi-cavity tool.
But in this instance, they needed just dozens a year, so we made a one-cavity compression mold. We buy the raw material, we prep it, we put it into the compression mold, and we mold their part. That’s an example of a molded part.
Similarly, somebody might come to us and say they need some tubing. That lends itself to the extrusion process because it’s a long, continuous shape, and that’s beneficial because extrusion dies tend to be less expensive than compression molds. So, in that instance we would say, ‘OK, you can make an extrusion die.’ We extrude the rubber, cure it, there’s your finished rubber tubing.
Stamping tends to be the cheapest way. A part with a simple shape needs to be cut out of a flat piece of material. Of course, not all parts lend themselves to that. But if it’s a flat, stamped gasket, then a great way to make it is the stamping process, which likely has the lowest-entry tooling cost. It doesn’t take all that much money to make a stamped die.
D2P: You’ve mentioned that S&H is easy to work with. Can you tell us a little bit more about this aspect of your company’s culture?
MH: One way that always comes to mind for me is, we welcome customers to come in and see their parts run. We’ve always welcomed the customer to come in and look at their own product. We’re not going to let them see what else is going on in other molds.
So, the customer comes in, we welcome them back, and often, when they stand and watch the part being made, they learn a lot about how it’s made. Inevitably, we end up learning a lot about how they use their part and what they find to be their key characteristic, and what’s important about their part.
We’ve had customers come to us and tell us we’re easy to work with and they’re so thankful that we’d let them into our shop. That would be one example.
Another example of how we’re easy to work with is, we’re a pretty flat organization. That is, we don’t have a lot of layers of management. We give authority to our department managers to make decisions on the spot, and that’s allowed us to be really flexible. When a customer calls up with an emergency—let’s say they need parts right away, it doesn’t need to go up through a lot of levels to make that decision.
D2P: What are some of the typical applications that automotive customers need rubber parts for? I understand they’re used in everything from bumpers and door handle assemblies, to controlling noise, vibration, and harshness.
MH: There’s so much rubber in cars, and it’s such an important material in the manufacturing of cars. Over the years, we’ve made parts that go in every area, from the drivetrain to the CV boots, to clamps all throughout the vehicle. We’ve made motor mounts, gaskets and more.
I will say this: As with most parts, but particularly in automotive, the industry is asking for more and more from these parts. They want longer shelf life, they want better characteristics, they want them to withstand higher temperatures, or tear less easily. So, that has certainly been the challenge over the years.
D2P: What do you think is behind this increasing demand for rubber parts in automotive, particularly for parts with better properties and characteristics?
MH: I think one of them is high temperature environments. I don’t know if the engine compartments are higher temperature or running hotter than they were back in the day, but I would say that is one of the characteristics. And maybe over the years, they’ve determined that a particular rubber product was a weak link. Or it could just be, overall, a kind of continuous improvement environment where everyone’s trying to make a better, longer lasting product.
One thing that jumps out to me is the vibration and noise reduction. You hear a lot about that, and I think that’s where [automotive manufacturers] are actually using more rubber where they might have had a plastic or metal part in the past. Maybe they’re figuring that now, one of the great characteristics of rubber is that it can reduce vibration and dampen and reduce noise. I know the giant rubber companies, like Dow Silicones, are putting a lot of effort into that area—vibration and noise reduction.
We’ve also seen a lot of the aftermarket industry. People love to customize their vehicles, and so there are a bunch of companies that are making cool parts for customizations. Sometimes it’s cosmetic, and sometimes people make fancy aftermarket shift knobs or mud flaps. We get a lot of that, and it’s fun.
Another area that I’ve really seen is the whole overland [market]. That’s kind of the whole camping, outdoor travel, and adventure travel [phenomenon], where people want camping gear and pop-up tents, and ladders. It’s just booming. So, we’re getting a lot of companies that come to us to make parts for that, which is also fun.
The OEMs make some really capable, awesome off road trucks these days, and different cars, like the Ford Raptor comes to mind. It’s an incredibly capable off road machine and yet, there are aftermarket companies that make these off road vehicles even better. They put different suspension components, or just cosmetic customization things, or overland camping gear on them. That’s an area of automotive that we see a lot of activity in, and we enjoy participating in it because they’re really cool products.