Tiny-parts maker finds big market in Asia

The electrical connectors are so tiny that 250,000 barely fill a coffee cup.

To the naked eye, they're little more than large grains of golden sand.When Woody Wurster puts them under a microscope at his Custom Stamping Inc.

in Carson City, they become intricate pieces machined to tolerances measured in the ten-thousandth of an inch.

More remarkably, the tiny connectors are produced in huge volumes 5,200 a minute, 3 million in a 10-hour shift as Custom Stamping's strategy combines two seemingly contradictory elements.

First, the company launched by Wurster 33 years ago has specialized since its earliest days in difficult jobs, particularly those demanding exceptionally tight tolerances.

"It eliminates a lot of the competition," Wurster said recently.

"Not everyone wants to do the real difficult jobs."

That's proven particularly important as low-wage foreign competition particularly from China keeps pressure on Custom Stamping.

At the same time, however, Custom Stamping is no boutique shop.

It looks for long production runs at its plant near the airport in northeast Carson City.

Most of the parts made by the company are tiny the size of fingernail or smaller and a high-priced piece might sell for 5 cents each.

But volumes are high, commonly in the millions for each production run.

It's not unusual, Wurster said, for Custom Stamping to manufacture several billion pieces a year.

Those pieces end up in telecommunications gear, automotive airbags, computer and other high-tech applications for customers such as Northern Telecom and Tyco.

And like most companies dependent on telecommunications and high-tech customers, Custom Stamping has weathered tough times since late 2001.

Even as the company battles competition from Chinese companies "On some products, you just can't compete against the wages,"Wurster said exports to the Asian market are increasingly important for Custom Stamping.

That reflects the migration of telecommunications manufacturing to China and neighboring nations.

Wurster doesn't delude himself that his company's position as a supplier of high-quality stamped parts in the Asian market will remain forever.

Asian competitors, he said, are improving constantly, and his company needs to work hard to stay ahead.

One of the keys to keeping ahead is Custom Stamping's staff of 40 in Carson City.

Because the company requires exceptional tool-and-die makers, it trains its own with a four-year apprentice program.

The complex tooling they create gets a pounding as highly automated presses stamp down 1,000 times a minute and the tooling must maintain fine tolerances throughout the production run.

The challenges become all the greater as customers always want parts that are smaller and created more quickly than the previous generation,Wurster said.

The company often works closely with customers from the early stages of design to find cost-effective manufacturing methods.

"We save people hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions, by giving our input,"Wuster said.

Wurster launched the business in Southern California in 1970 and moved to Carson City about 10 years ago when he found the tax and business climate in California intolerable.

"From a business standpoint, it was a good move," he said.

While the company has remained busy, even through the tech and telecommunications slowdown,Wurster said the privately held company isn't likely to grow large.

"Companies like this never get to be giants.

You're making a piece that is part of somebody else's product," he said.

"But you can do quite well making a piece of something if you know how to do it."