By Karen Hanna
New owners have taken over the product line of a 63-year-old business focused on controls and diagnostics products for hot runners.
Chad Root, a former GM of Fast Heat Inc., and Manny Diaz, the company’s operations manager and longtime employee, purchased the company’s offerings in December 2020 and established Spark Industries LLC to manage the Fast Heat product line. During an interview on Jan. 5, Root was looking forward to opening a new facility and upgrading products in the line.
“Manny and I are both passionate about the business,” Root said. “We’ll be focused on integrating our controller with injection molding machine applications and [Industry] 4.0 cells and things like that.”
Spark Industries will be responsible for service, support, spare parts and open orders involving all Fast Heat products.
Root said he and Diaz, who invented Fast Heat’s MoldXChecker hot-runner mold-testing system and CableXChecker for testing hot-runner cables and connector wiring, plan to update Fast Heat products, some of which have been on the market for about 20 years.
“We sort of have a vision for where we want to go with this. It’s nice because Manny and I now are free to invest our money in projects, engineering projects and display upgrades and new products and things that we want to do that the previous owners were not ready to do,” he said.
The plans include a new HMI for the Pulse high-cavitation controller and a new modular controller for lower-cavitation molds, to be released in the first and second quarters, respectively.
In addition to the new products, Spark Industries also was planning a move — from Fast Heat’s facility in Elmhurst, Ill., to Elkhart, Ind., about 120 miles away. Because employees mostly live about equally far from both cities, the new company will retain the entire workforce.
Root declined to say how many employees work for the company and did not provide information about the cost of the acquisition.
While Spark Industries now owns the Fast Heat product lines, Root said the Fast Heat company remains in the family of Tim Stojko, the son of its founder.
Karen Hanna | Senior Staff Reporter
Senior Staff Reporter Karen Hanna covers injection molding, molds and tooling, processors, workforce and other topics, and writes features including In Other Words and Problem Solved for Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing, Plastics Recycling and The Journal of Blow Molding. She has more than 15 years of experience in daily and magazine journalism.
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