CHICAGO, September 12, 2024 – Orion Industries, Ltd. (Orion) celebrates its 60th anniversary as one of the most technologically advanced functional coating applicators in the industry, and as a respected leading functional industrial coatings partner for companies worldwide.
“Orion’s investment and expertise in extensive automation and robotics provides our customers with consistently applied coatings that meet or exceed their demanding performance and delivery requirements” said president Kevin Hess, who assumed leadership of the company in 2023.
Orion serves primarily large and mid-size manufacturers and component suppliers in a wide variety of industries, including aerospace, defense, automotive, agriculture, food processing and cookware, chemical processing, and numerous manufacturing applications.
In 1964, Orion was founded by Bruce Nesbitt, a young entrepreneur who envisioned great possibilities for the use of functional coatings to improve the surfaces of parts and component assemblies. Little did he know that his insatiable curiosity for how to make things work better would result in the development of a leading enterprise in the functional industrial coatings industry.
“We began applying Alpha Molykote, a molybdenum disulfide lubricant coating, to race car parts. As word spread about us and the promising coating, further opportunities and growth followed,” said Nesbitt, founder and chief technology officer. Orion began using Teflon®, also known as polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), coatings from DuPont (now Chemours), one of the most widely used functional coatings, and became an authorized licensed applicator of Teflon® in 1979. Today it is licensed by dozens of leading global coating manufacturers.
“Over the years, we have significantly increased our offering of functional coatings, many of which we formulate in our in-house coating lab,” explained George Osterhout, past president and senior advisor. “Introduced in 1994, our FluoroPlate® line of functional industrial coatings offers over 100 different coatings for a variety of unique applications,” he added.
In its quest to maintain operational excellence, the company sought out and earned quality certifications, including ISO 9001 (since 2007) and AS9100D and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) (since 2015).
With each new customer challenge, Orion leveraged its growing knowledge about functional coatings and applied the “What if…” factor. In this way, it came to fully understand a project’s technical requirements and match that with the right coating formulation and application process to resolve issues such as friction, adhesion, product release, corrosion, noise, and abrasion to improve the performance of finished products and components. This, in turn, helps to increase their value and lifespan, and significantly reduce warranty claims and complaints, resulting in increased customer satisfaction.
”When customers told us that our coating is performing well, we always asked, ‘Why is it performing well?’ and ‘What can we do to make it even better for you?’” recalled Nesbitt, who from the start had been Orion’s technical mastermind or “Chief Tinkerologist” as he put it.
“We have an immense amount of gratitude to Bruce Nesbitt for building a world class organization and for his continued leadership and innovative engineering solutions,” said Hess.
To accommodate its continuous growth, Orion expanded in 2014 to its current 68,000 square foot location at 5492 N. Northwest Highway in Chicago, and still utilizes its previous production facility at 5170 N. Northwest Highway. Today Orion employs over 100 people, including many long-term team members, and has retained its key technical staff. Orion is wholly owned by the Elektrisola group, a privately held group of companies with 19 facilities and 5,400 employees worldwide.
Contact Orion to learn more. Follow on LinkedIn.