On New Year's Eve of 1981, a major fire virtually destroyed the primary KME manufacturing building as well as a significant portion of the tools and machinery, and what remained of the equipment was moved into an auxiliary building from where the company operated until 1990. In January of that year, the company was finally in a position to build a new facility of its own design, and moved to its current location in the Gorham Industrial Park.
In late December of 1993, Norm Trudel, who had been General Manager of the company for the previous eleven years, purchased Knowlton Machine Engineering, and John Shaw became General Manager. Immediately after this transition, a plan was implemented to transform KME |
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into a modern CNC service shop; to recapture its position as a preeminent designer of custom machinery; and to become a sole-source manufacturer of entire machine systems. In January of 2007, Shaw became a full partner in the company.
To date, KME has expanded its engineering department; both in terms of diversified talent as well as computer hardware and software, and we have also added state of the art manufacturing equipment. In addition to the acquisition of standard machine tools such as mills, lathes, and two large horizontal boring mills, we have also taken delivery of many standard and large sized CNC machine tools. We have also greatly increased and automated our fabrication capabilities, and have constructed an electronics controls assembly room, a machine assembly area, and a plastics fabrication and welding area. |
