Meet the team at REC

Wednesday, 30 June 2010 15:38

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Stafford Springs is the current home of REC, a high-tech machine shop owned by Alan Gnann. This part of Connecticut has many hi-tech machining companies ‘in orbit’ around Pratt & Whitney, one of the aerospace companies of United Technologies, and REC’s building, on Middle River Road, was once home to an aerospace supplier.

Today, however, REC serves America’s rod-building industry.

Alan, currently chairman of the American Fly Fishing Trade Association, declines to identify his customers, but a display of REC-built rod tubes reveals the logos of such companies as Orvis, Redington, Thomas & Thomas, and other top brands.

More than 90 per cent of REC’s output goes to original-equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, and maintaining their anonymity is an unwritten, professional courtesy.

Alan learned the fly-rod business and its ethics long before he acquired REC, in 1996, when the company was a small component maker in Vermont. During his time as an officer in the US Navy during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Alan built his first fly rod. A whippy cane rod, it hangs among scores of more modern fly rods in REC’s hallways. (Alan encourages his employees to borrow any of the rods on display; on the day TTW visited the factory, four employees were out fishing.)

Soon after Alan built that first rod in 1973 he found himself becoming a part-time custom-rod builder. An engineer and corporate executive by day, by night he built more than 500 custom rods, many in the early days of Sage’s custom-builder programme.

As he climbed corporate ladders Alan moved from place to place, including the Pacific Northwest – the home of Lamiglas, G Loomis, Sage and Boeing – where carbon-fibre tube technology drifted from the aerospace industry to fishing rods and golf club shafts.

Alan eventually landed in Hartford, Connecticut, in charge of acquisitions for a major American corporation.

“It was a time when my colleagues were about 15 years older than me,” he said. “I was in my mid-40s and was able to take money I had saved to buy a company.

“I wanted to be in the fly fishing business… and I approached several companies.”

REC had been in business since 1968, and Alan bought his first chunk of the company in 1996; a year later, he owned it all. Then he bought Mildrum and Perfection, two other companies that manufactured rod components.

REC buys cork for rod grips and fighting butts from Portugal. Only three to four per cent of Portuguese cork goes to the fishing tackle industry, Alan says, with most of it going to the wine industry. Fishing-rod makers are not high on the priority lists of Portuguese suppliers… except for Alan Gnann.

Much of the REC building in Connecticut is a ‘clean room’ certified by federal health officials to process cork bottle stoppers for wine and spirits for the cork company Alan founded, called CorkTec.

He started a sister company, Cork West, in Kennewick, Washington. With California being the largest wine producing state in the country, Alan decided that rather than trying to compete with well-established bottle stopper suppliers there, he would serve Washington and Oregon – America’s number-two wine-producing region – and New York State, the number three.

In both the Pacific Northwest and New York, the number of vineyards is growing, and the amount of land devoted to growing grapes is increasing. In many ways the cork business is similar to Alan’s fishing components business. They are both growing.

REC’s sales have increased every year since Alan bought the business – even as the economy was tanking. Over the same period, America’s wine consumption grew, too.

Both the cork business and the component shop employ robotics as well as the human touch. On the cork side of the REC building, robotic machines count corks, brand them with the customer’s logo and treat them with a wax that seals the wine from air, and silicone so that a 105lb restaurant server can remove the cork.

Whether they are lower-grade corks for $10 bottles of wine or top-grade stoppers for $50 bottles, every batch is tested to ensure its seal and ease of uncorking.

Similarly, many of the machined rod components are made by robots that can work, unattended, through the night. Then they go through several human hands for finishing and assembling.

“What differentiates rods are their components,” says Alan, illustrating his point with a rod ad that pictures the reel seat and butt. Many of his employees have been with the company for several years, and their goal is to produce fine fishing instruments.

That they care, really care, about fishing is obvious everywhere in the plant. Linda Gnann, administrative manager of the company and Alan’s wife, is an accomplished fly angler. In the shop, one long-time employee is wearing a G Loomis T-shirt, while another has tacked trout posters over his workstation. Another has pinned up fishing posters. Even the salt and pepper shakers in the employees’ dining room are red-and-white bobber floats.

REC makes things that will go into the hands of passionate people. CorkTec’s stoppers are being sold to people who are passionate about making wine, for consumers who are passionate about drinking it. Alan says: “Our slogan in the cork business is ‘Preserving Your Passion’.”

Diversity differentiates the cork business from rod components. CorkTec offers nine grades of wine-bottle stoppers, but how many parts does REC make?

“I don’t know,” says Alan. “Thousands!”

“With the exception of fishing-rod blanks, REC is capable of supplying everything required to build and case fishing rods.

“We are dedicated to meet the needs of fishing-rod manufacturers, commercial custom fishing-rod builders, distributors, and dealers worldwide by providing creative solutions to the most demanding applications.”

Of the thousands of components in REC’s storeroom, the most famous are RECOIL guides, first introduced at the fly-tackle trade show in 1998. RECOIL guides are made from a special nickel titanium alloy with ‘shape memory’ that doesn’t require plating, cannot corrode in any environment, and returns or ‘recoils’ to its original shape after repeated deformations. It’s a metal with the characteristics of plastic.

Today, RECOIL guides are found on spinning and casting rods, as well as fly rods, made by many of America’s top rod companies.