Gearing for success at Kleiss Gears
Precision molding company attracting attention from medical arena.
By TODD BECKMANN, Burnett County Sentinel News Editor
In the business of micro-molding, like in anything else, timing is everything.
Kleiss Gears came within a week of choosing New Richmond instead of Grantsburg as their future home. The company had just kept outgrowing all the buildings they moved into. In 2005, they were in a 3,000 square foot industrial site in a suburban strip mall and had outgrown it as well.
“We were really stuck,” Kleiss, who has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Kansas University and a masters from Michigan Tech, said. “We had tried to grow, but we weren’t getting any help from the state, so I looked at Wisconsin.”
He said it appeared the government would be more helpful in assisting the company grow, and they were right on the verge of starting construction of an extremely risky new facility in the industrial park in New Richmond when they found out about Ultra Tool’s problems.
“We missed the auction but I talked with Pat Fin and he said the building was for sale,” Kleiss said.
The two reached a price on the building.
“It had everything we wanted and more,” Kleiss said of the building with a laugh. “It had air-conditioning in the back, a completely open production area, and it was a 14,000 square foot facility — I remember thinking at the time ‘This is way too big, I’ll never, ever use all this space.”
And now, a mere five years later, Kleiss Gears has grown from five employees to 17 and is looking at the possibility of expansion.
“If any of these things take off like we expect them to, we’ll have to consider growing,” he observed.
He’s referring to the medical field Kleiss is becoming more and more involved in. From insulin pumps, artery plaque busters and an alternative to current colonoscopy technology, the medical community is beating a path to Kleiss’ door.
Life at Kleiss
The insulin pump is just one example of life at Kleiss Gears. “They came to us and said ‘We have this idea if we use a small enough transmission with enough torque, we can drive insulin into a patient — but the device can only be a big as your thumbnail,’” Kleiss explained. “‘How do we do this?’”
The medical group gave Kleiss a package and their job was to fit gears into it. “We have a lot of software we have developed for the design and analysis of plastic gears to make sure they enough strength to work and the gears can be modified to make the shapes we need,” he explained.
So engineers start work with their computer-aided drafting (CAD) systems to see if they could make gears to fit the package they were given. “When we did, we came up with these little, tiny gears (some as small as a pin head).” he pointed out. “The problem is that we know very little about these gears — we estimate what they can do, but we really don’t know if we’re right or wrong.”
Kleiss said at this point the customer has a big problem — whether or not to go ahead with the unproven solution Kleiss engineers have developed. “Quite a bit of the time it comes down to whether they trust our research,” Kleiss noted. “That’s probably one of the hardest things to sell in this business — confidence in your estimates of success.”
The company did feel that confidence and gave Kleiss the go-ahead. Making the parts was only the beginning. They had the thumbnail-sized device, but still didn’t know anything about it or that it could work. So they had to build their own to see if it worked. After running it through their testing equipment, they discovered it worked, and it was onto the production floor — and that’s where another problem cropped up. “When we use the machine which makes most of our parts to make these small parts, we end up with a lot of material leftover,” Kleiss explained. “Plus, it would take a lot of time to make the 10 parts we needed for our little device.”
The combination of these two problems made the production of the parts needed very expensive. That led to a new method of molding which would make it possible to make accurate parts faster than what current machines at Kleiss would allow. They found their answer in Austria, in a Wittmann Battenfeld Microsystem 50. Instead of a cubic foot-sized molds on his other machines, the mold for the micro-molding machine is three or four cubic inches.
Now the company could make the micro-sized parts needed, but they still needed to be able to inspect them to ensure they met functional criteria. “Inspection equipment is based on probes or optics, but our gears are so small you can’t find a probe small enough to get in between the teeth,” ,” he pointed out. “Optics will work if you have a nice edge to measure, but if it’s a twisty shape then even optics can’t get down there to see it.”
So, a new technology called tomography, like a cat scan of the brain, allowing engineers to see the part in 3D, was brought to bear. “We can actually look inside and see if there are any voids or misconstructions,” Kleiss continued. “It’s almost like looking inside the human body to see how it’s working.” That’s one of about half a dozen projects going on at Kleiss Gears. “We’re becoming known for being successful in new projects and projects others are having trouble with,” he admitted.
“It’s our reputation for precision which is really driving our growth in the medical device market,” marketing coordinator Jane Kleiss offered. “Our medical device market has tripled in the last three years — in a lot of cases, it’s referrals from other projects we have been successful with.”
A continuing success
Kleiss Gears started in Rod Kleiss’ daughters room in the Twin Cities about 20 years ago. “I started as a consultant and added one thing at a time as needed to continue to develop the type of gears we were looking to make,” Kleiss recalled. “We started off simply fixing plastic gears that were in the industry and, as we got into it more and more, we were asked to develop new styles of gears for new products.”
Kleiss said as the company entered into each new area of expertise, they found something missing. “It was either in inspection, design, or the types of gear molding available, the production capabilities of making precision parts — it was always something that was missing,” he continued. “I kept adding each little dimension to the company.”
The newest addition is the tool shop — Kleiss Precision Tools.
“We’ve always had trouble when we try to outsource any component of our process,” Kleiss admitted. “We finally found the only way to assure we get the product we want is to do everything ourselves.”
“We’re expecting a lot from this,” he noted. “We’re doing things no one has done before so even the toolmaker doesn’t have a good idea of how to do it.”
All these things had to be put in place in order for Kleiss Gears to get where it had to go. “It’s never been as well in place as it is here in Grantsburg — I was never able to assemble the pieces of the puzzle as well as I could here, and I guess that says something about Grantsburg,” Kleiss added.
Good fit
“I was afraid of leaving the cities because I had tool makers in the cities and I could get skilled workers there and I didn’t know if that was going to be possible up here,” he explained. “But resources around here are really good — it turns out we have a little niche of technology right in Grantsburg which keeps talented people close to home.”
“It attracts talented people,” chief operating officer Melanie Kleiss Boerger added. Kleiss has already attracted a few really good engineers who chose Kleiss because, at least partially, they like the area and want to live here. “We’re quite happy with the way we fit into the Grantsburg community,” Kleiss said. One of those fits is the partnership between the gear company and the high school. “We go over and share our gear geometry with the students and bring them over to see our layout here,” he indicated. “The math and science teachers in Grantsburg are unusually gifted teachers — I have rarely found that caliber of teacher in any school.”
“The students have a good work ethic, are quite interested and it gives them a better idea of what do I do with geometry,” he continued. “So I’m pleased to help anyway I can.”
Looking ahead
The future looks bright for Kleiss Gears.
“The University of Wisconsin is interested in working with us to become more efficient with plastic materials and I’m on the advisory board at UW-Stout for plastics engineering,” Kleiss pointed out. “I’m beginning to think ‘Why couldn’t we develop the reputation in northwestern Wisconsin as the hotbed of precision plastics/polymer engineering in the world?’”
“We’ve got everything here — we have the universities, we have a bunch of interest, we have high-tech companies,” he continued. “I just don’t see why we can’t.”