’s fiscal year started normally in October 2008. A month later, orders for its products dropped in half.

Selflock, which has been making machined products in the same building on Marcy Street, in East Syracuse, since 1920, felt the full brunt of the recession — all in the span of one month.

“We got stuck with a lot of inventory,” said company President David Freund.

Selflock reacted quickly. Its work force of 30 people was cut to a four-day work week, then a three-day work week. But that still wasn’t enough.

In January 2009, Selflock laid off 11 of its employees. That might not sound like a lot, but it represented more than a third of the company’s work force. And it told the remaining employees not to expect any wage increases.

“We had to freeze wages because we didn’t know how long it was going to last,” said Freund. “We were eating through our cash reserves.”

Selflock was not alone. It was joining many other local manufacturers feeling the pinch of area’s worst recession since the early 1990s. The recession has hit nearly every major industry sector in the area, but manufacturing has taken the biggest blows. The Syracuse area lost 2,300 factory jobs last year, 7.4 percent of its manufacturing work force.

To survive, manufacturers have cut people and costs and looked for new markets for their products.

At Selflock, cost-cutting was just part of the company’s survival plan. It also focused its business more on low-volume but higher-priced precision products, rather than high-volume, low-priced products. That way, it was no longer competing against cheap foreign labor to make large lots of components with very small profit margins.

That continued a trend the company started 10 years ago, when it began investing in machines capable of making very precise cuts of brass and steel components. In the past couple of years, those investments have totaled more than $600,000 — not an insignificant investment for a small company.

At first glance, Selflock’s manufacturing floor looks unchanged from the 1920s. Photos of the same space in the early days of the company’s history hang inside and outside of Freund’s office. But the new equipment in the old space has made it possible for Selflock to quickly make more complicated machined parts — parts with a variety of screw holes and shapes and made with a high degree of precision.

“There was some foresight about where the market was going,” said Freund.

Founded by a group of investors, the company started as the Selflock Nut & Bolt Co., making screws with a patented vibration-resistant thread for the railroads. One of its biggest customers was the New York Central, which is why the company settled in East Syracuse.

These days, Selflock makes very few screws. Instead, it makes parts that go into residential, commercial and automotive air conditioners, natural gas service components, cable television connectors, overhead door hardware and even theatrical stage equipment.

“You need a part, we make it,” said Freund.

Among the equipment it bought was a machine that cleans cutting oils and metal chips off of the products once all the cutting is done. At $250,000, it wasn’t cheap. But Freund said it allows the company to deliver extremely clean parts to customers that demand extremely high quality and are willing to pay for it.

“They want it to be cleaner than ever before,” he said. “They want to be able to just use them in their products right away. They don’t want to have to clean them.”

Selflock recently produced a marketing brochure that contains a picture of some of its brass products on a dinner table and the words, “Clean enough for the dinner table.”

The new machine also allows Selflock to reclaim all of the lubricating oils it uses during the manufacturing process, providing a cost savings.

Freund said the changes, combined with a pickup in the economy that started in April, helped to turn things around for Selflock. Orders began creeping back that month, and Selflock began recalling the workers it had laid off.

The orders roared back almost to normal by June as customers began replenishing low inventories of parts. By the end of the month, the company was back to its full complement of 30 employees. The layoffs were over. By fall, so was the wage freeze. Wages for the company’s machinists start at $10 an hour and go up to $20 an hour.

“It turned out to be a better year than 2008,” Freund said. “It started terrible, and it ended great.”

Dan Kuhns, co-owner of the company and its vice president of sales, credits the shift to higher-profit parts, a shift that started a decade ago, with getting the company through the recession. Kuhns and his wife, Tracey, have owned the company since her father, who bought Selflock in the early 1970s, died in 2003.

“Who would have known 10 years ago that it was going to help us out of this?” asked Kuhns.

Randy Wolken, president of the Manufacturers Association of Central New York, said the companies that have fared the best during the recession are those that, like Selflock, looked ahead, made the right investments and continued marketing themselves.

“Those who were better prepared for it came out of it better,” he said.

--Contact Rick Moriarty at rmoriarty@syracuse.com or 470-3148.

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