"Big Ed" Green

Oct. 17, 2008
Oak Ridge Fabricators, in a sense, started when “Big Ed” Green worked at an automotive service shop. One evening after closing, Green had a customer pull up. He needed his tires serviced for a business trip the following day, so Green ...

Oak Ridge Fabricators, in a sense, started when “Big Ed” Green worked at an automotive service shop.

One evening after closing, Green had a customer pull up. He needed his tires serviced for a business trip the following day, so Green re-opened the shop.

The customer was impressed with Green going the extra mile, and said he’d make it up to him.

That customer was an instructor at the local vocational school, and was so appreciative that he arranged and paid forGreen to attend the school and earn his machinist certification.

Green worked at several shops until he started his own from a fabrication shop that produced weight-lifting equipment in a building that used to be a grocery store.

Green’s five-man shop began manufacturing sewing machine components, and his sons Scot, John and Matt all eventually made their ways into the business.

The shop’s first big job was making quickattach couplers that became its core business. New machines were purchased, a second shift added and the coupler job led to additional work in hydraulics components.

In the early 1990s business slowed until the shop landed a job making custom machine components for a shop that supplied TRW.

By 1997, Oak Ridge Fabricators had 12 employees, and was winning $800,000 contracts for work that would run for years at a time.

In 2001, the shop started doing work for USEC.

Until the day he died, “Big Ed” Green never forgot the opportunity he was granted and always tried to give back to his community. He sponsored several civic youth sports teams, donated to local area high school athletic programs, and never hesitated to help anywhere he could.

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