Sheet Metal Stamping Simulation

B&H Tool of Richmond has received a $2.3 million low-interest loan from the federal government that will keep the metal stamping business in operation and its more than 80 local workers employed.

The firm, which stamps metal parts for the automotive industry, also employs more than 30 in Rockcastle County. Its weekly payroll in Madison County is $50,000, with the Rockcastle payroll totaling $20,000 a week, said its president, Sammy Hammons.

B&H, on Lancaster Road, makes parts mostly for Toyota and Honda, but also for General Motors and Ford, he said.

Federal and local officials, including U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler, D-Sixth District, met Monday morning with B&H Tool’s workers and management to celebrate the transaction.

The loan, with a 20-year payback, was funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the “Stimulus Bill,” and came through the Dept. of Agriculture’s Rural Development program with coordination by the Kentucky Highlands Investment Corp.

B&H Tool is using the money to pay off higher interest short-term loans from private lenders, Hammons said. Most of those loans were made in 2006 near the height of an economic boom when B&H employed about 160 and had the best year since it was founded in 2006, he said.

“The bottom dropped out of the market in 2007,” Hammons said, and the firm had to layoff workers as it experienced its worst year ever.

The following year was about as bad, but the market started to pick up in 2009, Hammons said. Still, “If Kentucky Highlands had not come to the rescue,” Hammons said, B&H might not have survived, because the manufacturer’s “long suffering” private lenders were running out of patience.

Jerry Ricketts, president of London-based Kentucky Highlands, praised Hammons as the kind of entrepreneur “that eastern Kentucky has too few of. If each our counties had 10 entrepreneurs like Sammy Hammons, we’d have no unemployment problem.”

Chandler also praised Hammons and his employees.

“This is the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” the congressman said. “Anybody who can survive in this economy is doing something right.”

In addition to being a great day for B&H Tool, Chandler said Monday also was a great day for the federal government.

Although the federal government and the stimulus act have been much maligned, Monday’s announcement shows how both have been able to keep businesses in operation and workers employed, he said.

The survival of manufacturing firms such as B&H Tool are important for the nation’s future, Chandler said.

“America can’t be strong if we don’t make things,” he said. “Government assistance, however, does no good unless it goes to good people like the fine folks of B&H Tool.”