Members of the community visited Dee, Inc last week as a part of the Crookston Manufacturing Week Tours organized by the Crookston Area Chamber and Crookston Housing and Economic Development Authority. Dee was started in the garage of high school Industrial Arts teacher Jim Ellinger where he began casting row finders for sugar beet harvesters and has expanded over its 48-year history into first recreational production and more recently into the automotive industry explains Nick Nicholas. “Dee started in 1971,” said Nicholas. “Jim Ellinger was the original owner that started the company. It started as mostly a recreational foundry where the major customers were Arctic Cat and Polaris. That changed for us, probably 2000 or so we changed over to automotive and now our major customers are mostly heavy-duty truck engines for over the road type transportation. So, our major customers are Cummins Engines, Detroit Diesel and a company called MTU.”
Using a 96,000 square foot foundry and 32,000 square foot machine shop Dee, Inc produced more than 300,000 parts in 2018 for customers across the United States, Europe, South America, and Japan. East piece is cast in aluminum and takes about 14 days to produce according to Nicholas. “Everything that we cast is in aluminum,” said Nicholas. “So, we cast from the ingot up to machining, finishing everything out and then sending it either directly to the assembly line or to a second party that does the e-coding for us. The process from ingot to going out our door is probably about 14 days.”
As far as the company is aware, Dee, Inc. is the only aluminum sand foundry in Minnesota certified to produce parts for the automotive industry. They operate a 24-hour schedule, six days a week said Nicholas. “We run about 24 hours a day starting up Sunday nights through Friday nights,” said Nicholas. “One of the operations runs two shifts on Saturdays. We staff about 100-115 people, of that about 80 are production workers and the rest are support people to that group. Again, we run 24 hours a day, six days a week usually.”
