February 2010 - In 1910, Alva Fisher patented the first electric-powered washing machine; the first commercially successful electric bus line opened in Hollywood; and Henri Fabre piloted the first seaplane to take off from water in Martinique, France. All these innovations and many of the ones that followed shared common goals: to make life easier, faster or more efficient.
Count Carl M. Yoder among those whose innovations changed the way their industry worked. In 1910, Yoder, who worked as a draftsman for a Cleveland-area sheet metal company, developed the first continuous cold roll forming machine for the production of automotive mud strips. Called the Yoder Y-70 Mud Strip Forming Machine, the product jump-started a line that soon included strip wiring machines and beaders, a crown fender rolling machine, a rotary shear, a power hammer and a brake shoe machine.
Cold rolling gave Yoder's customers a way to create structural and ornamental shapes, panels and moldings that were more uniform in shape and provided a higher strength-to-weight ratio than hot rolled or extruded structural shapes. Uniform products led to more accurate bending, welding and fitting in production machinery, in comparison to the slower, more expensive hand fitting.
As the company grew and the demand for cold roll formed structural shapes increased, roll formed products expanded into markets including ships, railroad coaches, airplanes, automobiles, trucks, furniture, steel buildings and refrigerators. In a advertisement published in 1948, The Yoder Co. noted that cold roll forming was the "most economical mass production method for converting flat-rolled metal into structural and ornamental shapes, pipe and tubing." The company said that, at the time, one single operator was capable of producing about 10,000,000 lineal feet per year of products.
In the 1930s, the company introduced the first commercially available resistance weld tube mill, and in 1940, it introduced the M-Style gear head, which is still an industry standard. In the 1950s, it was the first to apply induction welding to the production of welded seam tube and pipe, and in the following decade, it developed an in-line process to produce refrigeration-quality annealed tubing using a cold-stretch reduction process that is also still widely used today.
The company's dedication to research and development has also led to several collaborations. In the late 1970s, Yoder worked with NASA and Grumman Corp. to develop a machine for manufacturing structures in space. The system included a Yoder roll forming machine because, at the time, Yoder was the standard roll former used in the defense and aerospace industries. The project never got off the ground, but it is an example of the company's commitment to innovation.
And in the 1980s, the company developed an in-line system for General Motors that could roll form, sweep and cut off front and rear bumper bars and brackets, including pre-piercing of mounting and locating holes.
Today, Yoder is a part of Formtek Inc., Cleveland, a subsidiary of Mestek Inc. The company's Cleveland offices house new equipment and aftermarket sales and service departments, as well as engineering, fabrication, roll engineering, production control, purchasing, machining and assembly departments. The company believes that keeping the manufacturing process in house allows it to control both the quality and the delivery of the machine components. It also allows the company to customize its products to meet customers' requirements. With approximately 20 full-time engineers on staff, Yoder has the ability to engineer everything from standard mills to complex production lines. MM
