New Projects To Boost Rahco Work Force, Sales
Rahco International, a North Spokane manufacturer known for canal-digging equipment and hillside combines, expects to add 50 people and increase sales by $10 million this year as it pursues a variety of new projects of immense scale.
President Richard Hanson, who purchased the company from his father last year, said the deals fit the company’s strategy to focus on delivering a few products with superior technology rather than a multitude of generic machines that dozens of companies could copy.
“We don’t have confidence in patents anymore,” said Hanson, whose father, Raymond Hanson, was issued more than 100 patents for various inventions.
“It takes too long and it’s too easy to replicate. Our intellectual inventory is more valuable to us than a patent.”
The shift could help increase Rahco revenue from $15 million last year to $25 million this year, Hanson said. Employment is projected to rise from 130 to 180 people at the 12-acre factory at Magnesium Road and Crestline Street.
Some of the massive projects in the works include:
Constructing a pair of mobile conveyors for moving ore in a Chilean heap-leach copper mine. These 1,000-foot transporters will move 10,000 tons of copper ore per hour and travel on powerful, remote-controlled crawler tracks.
Rahco signed a $17 million contract last month to complete the conveyors by mid-1997. The conveyors will be delivered to a state-owned company that’s developing an open-pit mine in northern Chile.
Developing a landfill lining system to contain hazardous waste in southern Idaho and elsewhere. Returning to trench-digging technology that Rahco used in the 1970s for MX missile sites, Hanson said, the company has designed a way to wrap an impermeable liner around a landfill without removing and processing the wastes.
“It’s like putting the landfill into a bathtub,” he said.
Rahco and the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory will seek an $800,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy next month to complete a full-scale test of the technology in southern Idaho.
However, Rahco’s success depends largely on public acceptance of a system that is 99 percent guaranteed to prevent ground-water leaching. Hanson said Rahco is betting regulators will adapt the lining system as a cost-effective way to protect the public without breaking their budgets to do it.
“We think this is a huge market,” said Hanson, who also has developed remote-controlled radioactive waste cleanup devices.
Creating an automated station for gigantic rock crushers. While Rahco has yet to land such a deal, it believes that rock-crushing stations may be a natural extension of the company’s expertise in the mining industry, Hanson said. The four-story stations would house gigantic crushers, with robotic systems that require little labor.
Continuing to provide irrigation canal equipment and hillside combines.
Rahco will convert at least nine $200,000 Deere Co. combines this year for use on steep Palouse hillsides.
It also will ship canal equipment to Egypt and is bidding on a $1 million to $6 million canal project in Pakistan, Hanson said.
, DataTimes