Plant tour: PulFlex Technologies, Ford City, Pa., U.S.

“We’re a custom pultrusion shop, and typically do the work that other pultruders can’t or don’t want to do,” explains Bryan Beimel, general manager of PulFlex Technologies (Ford City, Pa., U.S.). “We do everything from extremely complex shapes, to very large shapes, to super thin products, and pultrude everything from utility poles down to carbon fiber defense parts that are a few millimeters thick. We’ll pultrude a few R&D parts, or half a million parts a year. We’re in a fascinating little spot in the pultrusion world.”

The physical location of PulFlex Technologies is also a “fascinating spot,” and a fitting site for a company whose primary business is pultruded fiberglass composites. Ford City, located on the Allegheny River — about a 45-minute drive northeast of Pittsburgh — was founded by industrialist John Ford, owner of Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. (now PPG Industries), and became a hub for glass production. What is now PulFlex’s facility was originally constructed as a glass plant in the 19^th century, before PPG transitioned into its current paints and coatings business.

Building on this industrial legacy, PulFlex Technologies was founded officially in 2016 by Craig Lawson and Steve Mansfield, who each boast about 40 years of experience in the composites and plastics industries, mostly in the realm of thermoplastics and thermoplastic composites. A little more than 10 years ago, the two began working more closely with polyurethane (PUR) while working in business development for a resins manufacturer.

“We realized that the PUR resin available was superior over a lot of other resin systems we’d worked with, especially for use in pultrusion,” Mansfield says.

For example, he explains that PUR can enable 80% or more fiber by weight in a pultruded part — double that of what can be achieved using polyester (PE) or vinyl ester (VE). It can also offer higher strength and stiffness, enabling the design of thinner parts, and it doesn’t contain styrene or emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs) during manufacture. While UV stability has historically been cited as a reason against using PUR for exterior applications, UV-stable resins as well as UV-resistant paints and coatings enable it to be considered as an option.

“It was intriguing to us because a lot of the other pultruders weren’t using it, sticking to PE and VE because that’s what they’re comfortable with. So, we saw an opportunity,” adds Mansfield.

From this revelation, Mansfield and Lawson began discussing how to build up technology capabilities and a business around their idea for PUR-focused composite pultrusion. Serendipitously, they met the owners of the Blair Strip Steel company at a local social event, and were asked to visit the company’s Ford City machine shop, BelleFlex Technologies, for some consultation work.

The BelleFlex site, it turns out, had some unused space within its building, which Blair Strip Steel ultimately offered to Lawson and Mansfield to found what would become PulFlex Technologies in 2016.

How did a 100+-year-old steel company end up owning a composites business? “Blair Strip Steel is in the eighth generation of the family now, and they’re very aware of wanting to keep their name relevant and keep their business intact. Instead of defending themselves against plastics, they decided to become an adopter,” Lawson says.

Mansfield purchased the fledgling company’s first pultrusion line on Facebook Marketplace, and drove to Florida to pick it up. While developing their technical expertise, Lawson and Mansfield began communicating what they were doing with other pultruders that they knew, and were surprised to find their potential competitors supporting their efforts — even giving them some of the equipment they needed to get started. “What we were setting out to do was different enough that we’ve been able to work with the other players in this space, versus competing with them,” Lawson says.

“And it’s all exploded from there. Ten years later, we now have two locations, 16 pultrusion lines and 55 employees,” Beimel says. “It all started from a combination of meeting the right people at the right time, and understanding that there was a gap in the market.”

PulFlex today: Taking on complex part development

CW recently had the opportunity to tour PulFlex’s production site, which occupies 75,000 square feet behind BelleFlex’s operations. The second, more recent location is a 55,000-square-foot R&D site in a leased facility nearby.

Today, about 80% of the company’s business is in PUR-based pultrusion, mostly using fiberglass but with a growing number of carbon fiber applications.

Typically, PulFlex seeks out the more complex or in-development jobs, versus simple, high-volume “commodity” parts that larger pultruders would take on. Production volumes, as Beimel noted earlier, are highly variable, from as few as three parts total to 250,000 parts per year.

“We started as a small company, and we kept our small customers that don’t have super high volumes. We know what it’s like to be a small customer and we appreciate them coming to us, so we continue to run those small setups to work with them. Pultrusion is really great for medium to high volumes, but if we can make a small project work for a smaller company, we definitely like to do that,” explains Elizabeth Delp, sales and project manager at PulFlex.

As of CW’s visit, the company had 30 new parts on display that had been developed by PulFlex in the preceding 12 months — including a pedestrian bridge decking component, various window profiles, seawall parts, shovel handles and data center conduits.

Material prep and storage

At the main site, PulFlex currently runs 14 pultrusion lines (with room for expansion), purchased from a variety of suppliers and modified by the company to suit its needs.  

Visitors to PulFlex typically start out on the second floor, where the front desk and lobby, conference room and office space are housed, as well as a small desktop 3D printer used to validate part designs.

Downstairs on the production floor, “The layout of our facility is specifically designed to flow raw materials in, through production then out the door. We have a little bit of overflow storage that goes into our other building, but we keep things relatively lean in terms of inventory,” Beimel says.

As raw materials and dies are brought into the building through a garage door, they are immediately stored in the nearby die and materials storage area.

PulFlex uses a variety of fibers and resins depending on customer requirements, including fiberglass materials from Jushi (Tongxiang, China and Irwindale, Calif., U.S.), Metyx (Gastonia, N.C., U.S.) and Superior Fiberglass & Resins (Indianapolis, Ind., U.S.); resins from Dow (Midland, Mich., U.S.); carbon fiber braided fabrics from A&P Technology (Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.); and others.

There are also resin mixing and mat slitting stations in this area used as needed. “When a customer calls us, they tell us where the stress is going to be on the part, what sort of fire resistance is needed, if UV stability is needed, what stiffness is needed and what their budget is, and we have a variety of options either off-the-shelf or customized and blended in-house,” explains Emily Cieslinski, chemical and quality engineer at PulFlex. “Fiber and resin selection for a part really is key.”

Mats are typically slit to size by the supplier for large orders, but a manual mat slitter is available on-site for small and custom orders. “The order comes in, the inventory is verified, orders get sent to the slitter and then the material is cut for the fulfillment process,” Beimel explains.

Materials prep takes place while the pultrusion line for a particular part is being set up. “We’re able to get a line set up typically within a week of the die being produced. It all goes relatively quickly,” Beimel says.

Main pultrusion lines: Direct injection PUR

Past the materials storage area, the facility opens up into the main production floor, housing 12 pultrusion lines spanning most of the length of the space. At the far end of this room is an entrance to the BelleFlex side of the building, as well as a continuation into PulFlex’s shipping storage area.

Most of the lines, which are various lengths and widths, run PUR. “You can tell we use almost all PUR because you don’t have that strong styrene odor walking onto the floor,” Beimel notes. PulFlex also runs traditional PE or VE pultrusion lines as needed. The main difference on sight is that these run a traditional resin bath — the rovings are pulled through a bath of liquid resin before continuing on the line into the die — while the PUR lines are set up with injection boxes distributing resin directly onto the rovings.

While the direct injection process looks relatively simple — appearing as a clean black box that the fibers travel into dry and then out of wet — this is actually where a lot of the company’s IP is stored. “All of our PURs are injected in a direct injection system. The polyol and the isocyanate are pumping in through a static mixer, it’s combined in the injection box, and then the fiber goes through and wipes the injection box clean and pulls the resin onto the die. And then the exothermic process begins,” Beimel explains.

Lawson adds, “A lot of what we do is in our tooling systems and our injection systems. That’s what sets us apart from other people. It’s not as easy as just buying a drum of resin and fiber — how we’ve developed our injection system and how it impregnates the fibers is really what sets us apart.”

Why not use all PUR? Beimel concedes, “The challenge we have is that PUR pultrusions require double the tooling cost at the start of a project. So, we do run traditional PE resin baths, though we often end up converting a lot of those projects to direct injection eventually as well.”

Production applications running at the time of CW’s tour included everything from colored shovel handles, to retractable black pool fencing components requiring a customized process for the highest-quality surface finish, to girt support structures to be used in the construction of skyscrapers. 

“People always ask, ‘How fast do you run your process?’ but it’s not easy to answer,” Beimel adds. “Some parts can be pultruded at 60 inches a minute, and some will be 4 inches a minute. It very much depends on the part.”

Logistics is a large part of the manufacturing process for PulFlex — the company typically quotes a 10-week lead time for new parts, which is mostly time for the tooling to be completed and delivered, and as short as 2-week lead times for regular customers.

Machining, shipping and two longer pultrusion lines

Once parts are completed, they’re moved to the adjacent shipping room. This long, rectangular space includes a large storage area ending with the garage door for delivery pickup, an adjoining machine shop, as well as two additional, longer pultrusion lines. The max width on these larger lines is 60 inches, but the length is only limited by the size of the truck it will be delivered on, Beimel says. “We’ve quoted parts that were 100-plus feet long.”

At the time of CW’s visit, one of these lines was running a large seawall part, while the other was set up to pultrude the longest part PulFlex has yet made — a 60-foot utility pole. Each of these poles requires 1,800 individual glass rovings, along with numerous structural mats. Currently, they’re being manufactured using PE, and the line runs at about 7 inches/minute, or an hour and 15 minutes per pole. “We always like to joke that it’s way faster than a tree grows for a traditional wooden utility pole,” Beimel says.

PulFlex’s small machine shop houses several machines including a Laguna (Grand Prairie, Texas, U.S.) CNC machine. “All of the tooling we purchase or manufacture comes through the machine shop at some point,” Beimel says.

Some machining is done via waterjet by sister company BelleFlex, and there are various Pittsburgh area machine shops that PulFlex partners with. “We’re pretty fortunate to be in a hub like this, with so many nuclear and defense adjacent companies in the area, there are a lot of machining capabilities,” Beimel says.

In the machine shop, a machinist consults with a mechanical engineer. PulFlex’s mechanical engineers are involved with every stage of the process, Beimel explains. “They talk to customers, design parts, work with the machinists to make modifications, cut the cards and help set up the line. All of our engineers know how to weld and have basic machining skills.”

“Everyone is involved in the process. We all have experience in how to set up a line independently,” Delp adds.

Research and education focus lead to new products

In addition to the production work being done on the main facility floor, PulFlex also takes on a lot of R&D work, especially at its second location down the road that houses two additional pultrusion lines.

Current efforts include work with Dow to produce fire-resistant systems for parts within electric vehicle battery enclosures, pultruded parts made from lignin-based carbon fiber or natural fibers like hemp and flax, the use of vitrimers supplied by Mallinda (Denver, Colo., U.S.) to develop more recyclable wind turbine applications, and a variety of defense-related projects using carbon fiber materials such as braided fabrics supplied by A&P Technology. “We have a lot of R&D projects running. We’re always chasing the impossible, chasing the properties customers want,” Beimel says.

Stemming from these R&D efforts, the company has been steadily gaining business in carbon fiber composites. “Carbon fiber is a little more challenging to handle, but setup and processing time is pretty much the same as with fiberglass,” Cieslinski notes. In addition, at the R&D site, PulFlex has installed a patented, three-puller pultrusion line that allows for processing under tighter parameters.

A past R&D project resulted in the company’s first direct-to-market product, launched in 2024. Called Flex Connect, this 1.5 × 1.5-inch glass fiber/PUR T-slot frame solution was designed to supplement typical 80/20 aluminum frames used for industrial applications like automation cells. The drawback to aluminum is that it is electrically conductive, which can pose risks to humans as well as to equipment if an exposed wire were to come loose and touch against the metal frame of the enclosure. Aluminum is also subject to corrosion in certain environments.

To eliminate these risks, “Others in the industry had tried to make a composite version for years, but typical resins like PE get weak and are prone to breaking when you pultrude the thin end pieces of the frame,” Beimel says. “PUR composites have the transverse strength to hold up without breaking off.”

The product has begun gaining traction for automation applications, and Delp adds that PulFlex has also been working with engineering departments at universities to introduce students to the product and its uses. “Our hope is to get engineers using composites in their college days, so when they leave, they’re thinking about composites when they’re in the workforce,” she says.

Growth and future potential

Over the past few years, the company’s marketing and sales efforts have resulted in more than four times the number of parts quoted in 2025 as in 2023. “We’re growing quickly. We want to continue getting the word out that custom pultrusions are not limited to what they used to be,” Beimel says.

The company also continues to expand into new sectors, with perhaps the largest growth potential in defense and infrastructure. “For defense parts, people want thin and strong, but these days they also want high volume to be able to scale quickly if needed. So we’re running PUR and carbon fiber, which is the strongest pultrusion that exists, and nobody else is really running that,” Beimel contends. The fact that PulFlex is U.S.-owned is also an advantage for securing U.S. defense work.

In infrastructure, “designers still see PUR pultrusions as more of a novelty, so we’re working on getting the industry more comfortable with the material,” Mansfield explains. “As an example, we pultruded and tested 10-foot cross arms for utility poles. We had a PE version and put a center load on it and tested it to failure — it lasted to about 7,100 pounds. We made the exact same part in PUR, and tested it, and it went to 13,000 pounds.”

He adds, “It’s in our DNA to try and make the impossible possible. That’s how we’ve gotten all of our grants and development work from the beginning, and why customers come to us still. Everyone else tells them it can’t be done, and we figure out how to do it.”