Global Fastener News

March 24, 1986 – Allen Manufacturing Co., Hartford, Connecticut, looks to be headed for new ownership. But you’d never know it if you asked Allen Mfg. executives about it.

As you probably know, Allen Mfg. is a subsidiary of Chicago Pneumatic Tool Company, which is headquartered, not as you might expect, in Chicago but in New York.
And Chicago Pneumatic Tool is now the subject of a tender offer, seeking all the outstanding shares of common stock at $38 net per share. Back in January the stock was fetching about $22 so guess what we think is going to happen.
The group making the offer is DH Acquisition Corp., a Delaware corporation and a direct wholly owned subsidiary of Danaher Corp., a Florida corporation together with DanWest Partners, a New York general partnership.
The purpose of the offer is to acquire the entire equity interest in the company with an expiration date of April 15, 1986. At least 2,800,000 shares must be tendered by that time, warns the acquiring group or they may elect to drop the whole deal.
The $162.4 million tender offer is conditioned on reversing Chicago Pneumatic’s transfer of a million shares to an employee stock ownership plan.
We haven’t seen any reaction from Chicago Pneumatic as yet, either in the form of one of those letters to the shareholders from the top management pointing out “the totally inadequate price for your company” which the tendering company is offering or the other kind of letter extolling the virtues of the prospective purchaser.
Chicago Pneumatic Tool Company, which acquired Allen Manufacturing in 1956, is also the parent company of Allied Tube & Tractor Products, Inc.; Dynapar Corp.; Fox Valley Instrument Co.; The Jacobs Manufacturing Co.; The Partlow Corp.; Qualitrol Corp.; and Matco Tools Corp. Chicago Pneumatic Tool Division in Utica, New York, besides making a lot of air powered tools like chippers, drills and grinders, also produces automatic systems for the torque controlled driving of threaded fasteners.
We found in our FIN archives that Allen Manufacturing Co., headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut, began in 1910 when William G. Allen obtained the patent for a cold-drawing process for making hex-socket set screws much stronger than those then on the market. Over the next 75 years, the company introduced Allen Wrenches, cap screws, tap extensions, pipe plugs, buttonheads, Allenuts and assorted other products.
In the early 1980’s Allen began to shift some of its standard fastener production to Asia and today a significant portion of its product is made there.
In this country (according to our records) Allen Mfg. Co. has its major manufacturing facility employing about 350 people at East Dudley Town Road in Bloomfield, Connecticut. It also has a warehouse there and, we believe, in Weston Ontario (International Fasteners Ltd.) and Cerritos, California.
General manager of Allen is George Merrick and Ken Pobursky, as already mentioned, is national sales manager. To bring you right up to date, at least sales wise, the company has recently named two regional sales managers. Thomas M.Kelly will be responsible for sales activity in the southeastern territory and N. Daniel Wallner will be responsible for the midwestern territory.  ©1986/2015 Fastener Industry News.
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