For 140 years, the steady clank of steel and the grip of freshly forged pliers have defined Channellock, the family-run toolmaker rooted in Crawford County and known worldwide for its signature blue-handled tools.<\/p>\n
Founded in 1886, the company traces its origins to blacksmith George Birch de Arment, whose handmade tools quickly gained a following among local tradesmen.<\/p>\n
“The story goes, my great-grandfather, George Birch de Arment, was a blacksmith in what today is known as Connie Lake, Pennsylvania,” said Ryan DeArment, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Channellock. “So, he wasn’t satisfied with the design and quality of the tools that were available to him, so… being a blacksmith, he, you know, would prototype tools out of wood, whittle samples, and then hand-forge his own designs.”<\/p>\n
DeArment, now the fifth generation in the business, said the company’s manufacturing process remains detailed and hands-on, even as technology has reshaped the factory floor.<\/p>\n
“We start with a steel billet, so a steel bar,” he said. “We heat the steel, we then forge it… And then from there, they’ll be hardened. They’ll go through a body hardening process, and then we started laser heat treating our working surfaces.”<\/p>\n
The company heat-treats the teeth of tongue-and-groove pliers and the cutting edges of cutting pliers before polishing and grinding each tool.<\/p>\n
“Like the nose of a needle nose plier, and put the sheen, the shiny finish on it,” DeArment said.<\/p>\n
All production takes place inside the Meadville factory, where 325 Pennsylvanians work alongside automated systems. DeArment said automation has become essential.<\/p>\n
“There’s a lot of automation we’ve added to the process over the years. I mean, obviously, it’s harder to get labor; that’s one of our challenges today,” he said. “People don’t want to do the manual labor that they used to, so… we started automating, not because we wanted to get labor out of the process, but because we couldn’t really replace the labor as fast as we needed.”<\/p>\n
Channellock now manufactures more than 120 patterns of pliers and screwdrivers, shipping millions of tools each year across the United States and to 60 countries.<\/p>\n
“If you make a living using tools, you have a, you know, a channel lock blue-gripped tongue and groove plier in your pouch,” DeArment said.<\/p>\n
He credits the company’s longevity to the values embedded in its Pennsylvania roots.<\/p>\n
“I think being part of Pennsylvania, I mean, that’s one thing that we know is hard work, resilience, and doing things the right way versus the easy way,” he said. “The quality and the innovation and making products that people really use around the globe. It’s just… it feels good at the end of the day. And, you know, Meadville is famous for tool and machining.”<\/p>\n
Asked what his great-grandfather might think of the company’s global reach today, DeArment said the scale of its success would likely surprise him.<\/p>\n
“I think seeing where the company has come would probably… amaze him, just to see how far we’ve come, and how many tools we make,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For 140 years, the steady clank of steel and the grip of freshly forged pliers have defined Channellock,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152964,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[69521,69522,28,30,29,69525,69524,69523],"class_list":["post-152963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-channellock","tag-george-birch-de-arment","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-pliers","tag-ryan-dearment","tag-steel-billet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}