Van Buren company greases Wyoming, California windmills

story by Roy Hill

Van Buren-based Leding Lubrication has found a new market for its products on the windswept northern plains and the sunny west coast.

Over the last year, more of the giant electricity-generating windmills in Wyoming and California began using portable automatic lubricators designed and built in Leding’s small shop at 3012 Industrial Park Road.

“We just started with the windmills a year ago,” said company owner Ken Leding. “We’ve got a bid in to Florida Power and Light, and they’ve got more wind turbines in America than anyone else.”

Leding has owned Leding Lubrication for the last 15 years, and has sold oil and lubricants for 20 years. He sees real potential for growth in the demand for automatic lubrication machines.

“Automatic lubrication is in its infancy,” Leding explained. “The farther north you go, the more of it there is.”

Leding, using pictures, recently described how one of his automatic lubrication units worked on a California pellet mill making poultry feed.

“What this does, it applies small amounts of grease to the bearings every 15 minutes,” Leding said. “It’s setable in a text screen, so it knows how much grease to use, so it uses less grease over all. It also shows when it’s out of grease.”

Automatic lubricators can be big ticket items. A complete unit similar to the one on the California pellet mill could sell for around $15,000. But the big price tag means increased efficiency for the customer. The biggest advantage with automatic lubrication is that the machines can be lubed more frequently and while in operation.

“You can have constant lubrication without having to stop the machine,” Leding said.

The same advantages at the feed pellet mill apply for wind turbines, and all other machines requiring lubrication. Leding explained that the automatic units for the Wyoming windmills were redesigned to withstand a higher revolution per minute. The result was a machine that saved the windmill operators one hour of lube time per windmill, or about 160 less man-hours of maintenance.

Leding Lubrication is very flexible with its manufacturing, and most of its jobs are custom-designed for specific customers.

“Basically we can come up with a lot of things,” Leding said. “It’s what the customer wants, and we can make it.”

And those customers are diverse. For four years, Leding automatic lubricators have operated on the forming machine tubes that Oscar Mayer lunch meats are squeezed through at a plant in Kirksville, Mo. Another recent project is the machines that lube the insides of wheels that go onto Exmark Mowers. Leding stressed that the advantages of his automatic lubricators are increased efficiency and savings.

“We designed and built a system three years ago that fills the insides of their (Exmark) wheels with grease,” Leding said. “We designed it so it reads the part number and automatically flows the proper amount of grease. The machine senses where it’s at, and you can set it for the exact amount of grease that you want.”

While Leding fabricates many of its own parts, it also buys other parts and components from factories near and far.

“We use a lot of vendors. Fabtech,a precision sheet metal shop right across the street from us makes the sheet metal items that we use,” Leding said. “They do the laser cutting for us. We get motors and gearboxes from Iowa. We try to buy American when we can, but we do buy some plastic boxes from Sweden because that’s the only place that has the size we need. They’re nice people to do business with, except we’ve got to get up at 4 in the morning to talk to them.”

Leding Lubrication has two full-time employees and depending on demand, has three part-timers. Unlike many employees today, Leding employees have some degree of job security.

“I’ve been selling lubricants for 20 years,” Leding said. “Every machine out there has to be lubricated.”