Company History

Our Company was founded by Delos M. Palmer, Sr. in 1945 as an independent firm to render mechanical and electrical engineering services to local industries and for the firm of Forrester, Wernert & Taylor who was, at the time, an established firm of structural and civil engineering. The office was located in the National Bank building in downtown Toledo. Delos M. Palmer & Associates initially confined their services largely to steam power plant design and power distribution.

Mr. Palmer’s efforts with local industry and with the firm of Forrester, Wernert & Taylor were highly successful. As the volume of work increased, he added the capability of performing machine design. He added the additional staff to handle machine design in 1947. Then in 1948 he moved the headquarters to 4401 Jackman Rd. This location is Palmer’s headquarters to this day.

In succeeding years, as our reputation for reliability spread, the business continued to grow. Gradually, the machine design section became the most important part of our business and the company became known as a specialist in this field of engineering. During the next 15 years, expansion – particularly in the field of industrial electronics – required us to enlarge out staff and our facility several times so that by 1960 we occupied 12,000 square feet of space. The firm had 50 full-time employees.

During the 1970’s, the design and drafting was expanded to accommodate 70 employees. The firm continued to expand into product design and manufacturing. In 1983, additional building on the land was built to manufacture Phase Controllers. Phase Controllers portion of the business was eventually sold off.

In 1988 additional space was constructed to perform testing on automotive chassis and body. US Military was our biggest client for vehicle testing. We still perform test on vehicles.

As time passed, and technology improved, Palmer improved with it integrating the latest advancements in machine accuracy, reliability, communication and control. Utilizing state of the art processes and hardware keeps Palmer on the leading edge of providing efficient machines to meet our customers’ demands.

Since its inception, the ownership of Delos M. Palmer has changed three times and has gone through several management structures. However, as a company we have always stuck to our basic values of being strong in engineering fundamentals and passionately serving our customers. Through the years we have added following capabilities:

• Founded 1945
• 4401 Jackman 1948
• Machine Design 1950
• Instrumentation/Control 1955
• Testing 1960
• Finite Element Analysis 1970
• System Integration 1990
• Design / Build 1993
• Process Design 2000
• Project Management 2004
• “Turn-Key” operation 2010
• Custom Product design/build    2014