The saying goes when one door closes, another door opens. It’s meant to motivate people to not give up even when it seems like they’re out of options. That could not be truer for Khawar Anwar, president of All American Mechanical Components and Gears, Inc.
Anwar began his career as a gear engineer at a fine-to-medium pitch gear manufacturing company in 1987. In 2003, he was promoted to vice president of engineering. Not long afterward, his employer’s infrastructure came crumbling down. The company closed. He was left with two options: get a job or go out on his own.
With that adversity behind him, Anwar, who also serves as vice chairman of the AGMA Fine Pitch Gear committee, carried his new company onto the road to prosperity. Now, more than 10 years later, All American serves the gear manufacturing community with its custom quality products and focus on serving the individualized needs of its customers.
“Our edge is that we can make all types of fine-to-medium pitch precision gears with custom quality,” Anwar said. “In this industry, there are standard cataloging houses and custom gear houses. What we can do is provide the high-quality, low-cost custom gears. That is our main objective. We can minimize costs by controlling our overhead expenses.”
Within the gear manufacturing industry, All American is highly diversified. Its expertise lies in aiding its customers with the development, design, modification, and prototyping of gears. Often, when customers approach All American with a print design for a gear, Anwar and his staff have to completely restructure in order to make it perform the necessary application.
“The thing is that we are not just a manufacturer,” Anwar said. “So, other manufacturers may have all of the manufacturing machines and equipment where they can get the print and make those things. What distinguishes us from our competitors is that we have a good understanding of the gear. We can improve their print and their design and give them the feedback as to what can be done further to enhance the quality of those gears by suggesting some modifications to their design. We have a good engineering knowledge of the gear manufacturing process. That is something we can provide — valuable information — to our customer. For the customer who does not have in-house gear expertise, we can provide them with gear application and design services. That distinguishes us from most of the other gear manufacturers.”
Anwar attributes his company’s ability to carry out its unique customer demand for quality gear manufacturing to their in-depth knowledge of the gear itself and their ability harbor a symbiotic relationship with their customers.
“What I would like to tell my customer is that whenever they are sitting down and developing and designing a gear for the application, if they involve us at the beginning of their design and development process, we can help them greatly to reduce the cost of their product because if they design everything around the gear, then all of production costs will be too high,” Anwar said. “So, if they involve us at the beginning of the development of their product where the gear has been used, we can suggest to them what should be the concentration of the gear, which can be incorporated into their product. It will reduce their costs and the number of the components, and we can make the gear as a part of their machine element inside of their product.”
All American is able to successfully execute all of these demands for its domestic and international clients within the semi-conductor, biomedical, aerospace, robotics, dental, surgical, automotive, and scientific instrument industries — wherever fine-to-medium pitch gears are used — from its engineering house in Farmingdale, New York.
“We make precision internal gears,” Anwar said. “We make the fractional horsepower planetary gear drive, precision miniature differentials, and miniature worm gearboxes. Essentially, any gear or gear assembly that you can hold in hand, we can make it.
“One of our advantages is that we are not limited to only one type of gear. We make spur, helical, bevel, worm, internal gears, as well as timing pulleys and miniature sprockets all under one roof.”
With all of those production capabilities in Long Island, Anwar admits that the way his company operates is slightly different that most gear manufacturers. He insists, however, that this method has been proven to best serve his customers’ needs.
“We design and methodize all types of gears and gear assemblies at our engineering house in Farmingdale,” Anwar said. “Then, we source out different gear manufacturing processes, all of them in Long Island. After every completion process, we bring that part back into our office where we inspect the quality and go to the next process. By doing that, we complete the gear manufacturing process outside of our facility, but we do have an all-process quality check in-house. Then, we bring those parts in, we do the complete inspection, and we sell it to the customer.”
In addition to its demanding daily operations, All American is developing miniature differentials and a special planetary gear drive for a fractional horsepower motor, both due to be released within the next three to six months.
To learn more about how All American can help your business with its gear-design-and-manufacturing needs, call 631-420-9001 or visit www.allamericangears.com.
