By the end of the month Iola will be further invested in the oil business.
Superior Products, a specialty pipeline operation, will open in the Ray Pershall Industrial Park in north Iola.
The business, including warehouse and shipping, is being moved to Iola from Oklahoma City by Iolan Mark Burris, who recently purchased the company.
Randy Misenhelter, who worked with Burris at Precision Pump before it was sold to Cameron, will manage the plant. He and one other employee will assemble pipeline closures and chokes, as well as chemical pumps. A third employee will do office work.
The former Hiser Implement building, moved to the industrial park in June 2000, will house the industry. A concrete crew from Wichita poured and finished a floor in a 70-foot-by-120-foot work area Friday. Office space and a laboratory for testing will be in a front portion.
While the initial work force seems small, Misenhelter said it would be sufficient.
“We can do a lot of assembly in a day’s time,” he said.
Chokes permit operators to control rate of flow in a pipeline.
Closures are attached to the ends of pipelines and have a gate to give access for inspection and cleaning. They range in size to fit pipelines of 2 to 36 inches diameter. Those assembled here initially will be up to 14 inches in diameter.
An online price list notes that the closures and chokes sell for hundreds of dollars each, larger ones in the thousands.
The ready-to-assemble components will come from manufacturers in China, Canada and several states, including Nebraska and Oklahoma.
“The closures don’t require much assembly,” Misenhelter said. “They pretty much are all together when we get them.” The chokes are a tad more involved with several parts having to be screwed together, “but their assembly still goes pretty fast,” he said. Same is true of the chemical pumps.
Burris said employee numbers were expected to edge up over time. “I can visualize 10 employees within three years,” he said.
What might change that projection is the company growing into other product lines, Misenhelter added.
BURRIS SAID that he wouldn’t be involved in day-to-day operation of Superior Products. He also is president of Century International, Wichita, which sells and services drilling equipment and pumping units worldwide.
Burris started Precision Pump in Humboldt about 20 years ago to manufacture down-hole oil well pumps. He later moved the business to Iola to occupy a building that previously held the H.L. Miller and Son dress factory.
Precision Pump, with Burris marketing its product worldwide, grew to well over 100 employees. Two years ago it was sold to Cameron, a leading provider globally of flow equipment products, systems and services for oil, gas and process industries.
“This is another adventure,” said Misenhelter. “I was with Precision and Mark for 10 years and left to do other things,” after the Cameron purchase. “Mark and I had talked about getting together and doing something,” which materialized with Burris’ purchase of Superior Products.
“We have lots of room” in the Iola building, he said, “and we have interest in growing lines and finding new products.”
Burris foresees a strong demand for oilfield and pipeline equipment well into the future.
“The market fluctuates with crude oil prices and I think it will stabilize at higher prices,” he said, and not because of the recent spikes prompted by turmoil in oil-exporting countries in the Mideast and North Africa. “Consumption in China and India are a big factor and some say that Vietnam, with its cheap labor, will be the next China.”
Burris speaks from experience. He has traveled extensively worldwide — he has a trip to China pending on behalf of Century International — to market Precision pumps and more recently with Century International.
