History

Broaching Machine Specialties (BMS) has a very long history in the machine tool business. The business was started in the 1920’s as Machinery and Equipment Exchange and was officially incorporated in 1946. A company accounting log from 1936 has an entry for the sale of a “paint spray gun” which sold for, $7.50.

We’ve come a long way since then…

Machinery and Equipment Exchange got its’ start as a supplier to auto service stations, supplying air compressors, hydraulics jacks, hand tools, welders, etc. Over the next several years, the company evolved into buying and selling of all types of machine tools and the company continued to grow this way until the late 1950’s.

At that time, Detroit was home to at least 9 major manufacturers of broaching equipment. The broach companies would often call Machinery and Equipment in search of used broaching machinery that they could purchase, rebuild, and retool for their customers. The repeated inquires for broaching machines from these broach companies was evidence of a large market for used broaching equipment and the company capitalized on this by enlarging its’ inventory of used broaches. In short order, Machinery and Equipment Exchange, and the Egrin family, became the ones to call for anyone looking for a used broaching machine.

After dealing only in used, un-serviced, broaching machines for several years, in the mid 1960’s, the company began rebuilding the machines it was selling. At that time, the company would often partner with an established broaching machine company who would provide the tooling and Machinery and Equipment would mount the tooling on the machines it rebuilt, or, working another way, the company would rebuild machines for the other broach companies and the other broach companies that would then mount their tooling onto the machines that Machinery and Equipment had rebuilt.

The company grew like this for many years, but Lee Egrin, the President and second-generation owner of Machinery and Equipment, had a vision of the company becoming a full-service broaching machine company and to that end expanded the company’s engineering capabilities, which gave it the capability to be a “single source” supplier of all types of broaching machines for all types of broaching applications. Over the next 2 decades, Machinery and Equipment Exchange would rebuild and tool nearly every type of broaching machine that had been manufactured in the US since the 1940’s.

The company continued to grow this way for several more years and established itself as an industry leader in the supply of used broaching machines and rebuilt turnkey broaching systems. But the company was not done growing. After rebuilding hundreds of machines made by all of the various broaching machine companies, Lee concluded that his company had the capability to design and build machines that were more durable, more maintenance friendly, and more reliable than the machines the company was rebuilding. In 1986 Machinery and Equipment built its’ first new broaching machine, the BMS “Cruiser”, a high speed, single ram vertical broaching machine and the company quickly became a force to reckon with as a manufacturer of new, turnkey, broaching systems.