Although parts of the Brailsford & Co. Inc. building are visible through the trees on Route 202, it’s easy to breeze past the facility without knowing it.
“We kind of have a low profile in the area,” said President Robert Drummond Jr., who started working in the company’s machine shop when he was in high school and was hired full time in the early 1980s.
The sentiment was echoed by many of the company’s employees, who never knew about the business until they were in the market for a job, somehow heard about an opening, and applied.
“I’ve lived here my whole life and I didn’t know about this place until I started working here,” said Beth Bezio, who is a sub assembler and has worked at the facility since 2005.
And although the company may be a well-kept secret in the Monadnock region, the products it manufactures can be found in devices around the world.
The company got its start in Rye, New York, in 1944. One of the first motors it produced was designed for a device used in World War II called a radiosonde. The instrument was dropped behind enemy lines and transmitted air temperature readings, pressure and relative humidity to a receiver on the ground. Radiosondes were widely used throughout the war and were critical devices aboard weather planes sent out prior to bombing raids that ended the war.
Radiosondes are also suspended from helium and hydrogen balloons, with civil applications still in use today by various weather agencies and for polar and volcanic observation.
Brailsford has expanded its footprint, although much of its equipment that it uses to make the products is the same it always has been. Today, the company manufactures pumps, centrifugal blowers, axial fans, motors and a variety of supporting accessories, which are used in machines that span many industries, ranging from medical devices to instruments used in the oil and gas industry.
As an example, Drummond said, one of the pumps the company produces is used in a medical device that draws blood. Another is used in an incubator for premature babies.
Nearly every component of the company’s products is manufactured in Antrim. Its 14 full-time employees spend their time winding coils, stuffing and soldering PC boards, molding pump housings, assembling and coating motor laminations and operating a fully equipped machine shop.
On any given year, the company will produce 12,000 to 15,000 units. Drummond says the company has two main competitors, who are able to manufacture a higher number of devices.
“We compete through quality and services,” Drummond said.
For some time, Brailsford too outsourced some of its labor overseas, but Drummond said it has since brought all of its work back to the U.S.
“There wasn’t enough value there to justify it,” Drummond said. “Maybe for large corporations, but for small companies 50 [employees] and under it becomes a real issue.”
Now, with full focus on its business in Antrim, the company is looking to expand. Drummond said he would like to see the machine shop become a self-sustaining area of business for the company within the coming years.