SIZE It’s All About
MIGHTY. The word that describes springmakers across
North America. Whether they are a small company with under 15 employees, a midsized company, or one of the big hitters with multiple locations, they have an impact on the industries they serve, the customers they supply to, and the communities they enrich by creating jobs and actively supporting local events and charities. The springmakers featured in this article vary in size and serve every industry that uses a mechanical assembly. For the largest companies, automotive is a key area served; for some of the smaller springmakers, they have found a niche in specialized markets that are unique to their geographical location.
Dendoff Springs Ltd Mary-Anne Morris, Managing Director Surrey, British Columbia, Canada www.dendoff.com
Dendoff Springs was started by welding entrepreneur Hubert Dendoff over a hundred years ago. He saw an opportunity and morphed the business into a spring company. Eventually, the business passed on to his son-in-law and then to his
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granddaughter, Mary-Anne Morris, who took over at the young age of 23 upon her father’s death in 1985. “We serve resource-based industries,” says Morris. “Our parts are mostly used in heavy work, like forestry, mining, oil and gas and locomotive suspensions. We have developed our expertise in these heavyweight parts that are unique to our location and this is what we export from British Columbia to other parts of Canada and the U.S.”
By Raquel Chole
Morris is proud of the resourcefulness and versatility of her manufacturing operations. She specializes in custom work, and that usually means very large components. Dendoff does hot coiling as well as cold coiling (up to 5/8” diameter) of springs. Specialized leaf springs are a core product for the company and some of their leaf springs assemblies can weight up to two thousand pounds. There are not a lot of springmakers in Western Canada in general, according to Morris, which has helped her build a client base that numbers in the thousands across all different industries. “The Fords and GMs of the world are well catered to by some of the bigger spring companies in Eastern Canada and the U.S. Here we have to be a little more flexible. Out here in B.C., we don’t have the big OEMs as you have in the east. In forestry and mining you have a lot of the larger springs and a great variety of needs,” explains Morris. Resource-based industries are what drive the B.C. economy, and these comprise the major exports for this region. For example, logs from this province are shipped directly to China for processing — work that was once done in Canada. It has eliminated the need for sawmills
