SAN JOSE, Calif. (BRAIN) — If the voices on the phone at Phil Wood seemed a bit harried, consider for the past four months the company has been in the process of moving a mile from their old cannery location to a new location in San Jose. And in addition to the move they were doing their best to service customers and dealers.
"I'm glad to say that move is over. Right now we are in a slightly smaller space than we were, but eventually we will end up with 20,000 square feet here," said Garrett Enright, Phil Wood's president.
The company's old location was about 15,000 square feet.
"Unlike the multiple additions we had in our old location, we are now in a single large space and we really streamlined the work flow so the space seems much larger. We also brought another mill online, which we didn't have room for in the old location," Enright added.
The City of San Jose had rezoned the company's cannery location from light industrial to residential, and the cannery's owners let Phil Wood know they wanted to put in residential units, hence the need to find a new place. The company received invitations to relocate to Oregon, Nevada and elsewhere, but given the company's more than 40-year presence in San Jose, Enright said it didn't make sense to move out of state and leave its long-time employees in a lurch.
"Because so much of this last year has been consumed with the move many of our new products were put on hold. But this next year that will change as we have a few new projects in the works," he added.
One change to free up machine time is the company's plan to discontinue its track crank. Enright said they start with a 10-pound block of alloy for the drive crank and end up taking off more than nine pounds, a process that takes a lot of machine time. The company will be taking orders at Interbike for the last 100 cranks it plans to make before turning resources to other projects.
Phil Wood's new address is:
1125 North 7th St., San Jose, CA, 95112.Its phone number remains the same: (408) 298-1540.
