From a Farmer's Garage to the Frontlines of Aerospace

A COMPANY IN EXPANSION MODE

In 1957, Louis Seyer — a self-taught tinkerer and World War II veteran — used the modest proceeds from a kitchen invention called the Easy Egg Cracker to purchase a struggling machine shop in a farmer’s garage outside St. Louis. Nearly seven decades later, the company he founded has grown into one of the aerospace industry’s most trusted precision manufacturers, serving some of the largest defense and commercial aerospace primes in the United States from a 250,000-square-foot campus in St. Peters, Missouri.
Today, Seyer Industries is a third-generation, family-owned business employing approximately 370 people. Its customer list reads like a who’s who of the aerospace and defense world: Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Gulfstream, and the U.S. Navy, among others. And at the center of that growth story is a calculated, long-term investment in some of the most precise machining technology available — HERMLE 5-axis CNC machines and their proprietary automation systems.
By 2010, the aerospace market’s demand for tighter tolerances and more complex geometries had outgrown Seyer’s 3-axis capabilities. Flight components — from rotor bearings for military helicopters to arresting hooks used to land aircraft on carrier decks — required a precision platform that conventional machines simply could not deliver. The company needed 5-axis machining, and after extensive research, the Seyer family made a decision that would reshape the business.
Their first HERMLE — a C 40 — arrived in 2008 and quickly earned near-mythic status on the shop floor. “The energy around those machines was that they were the holy grail of machines,” recalls Jason Kinsler, who has spent the last eight-plus years running HERMLE equipment exclusively and now leads Seyer’s entire 5-axis HERMLE division. “I’ve run a lot of machines, and I have yet to find one that compared to a HERMLE. That’s just the truth.”
That first machine, now over 15 years old, is still running production today — a testament to HERMLE’s engineering and Seyer’s maintenance culture alike. The C 40 was followed by three C 400 machines and, over time, a fleet that now numbers 17 HERMLE units out of roughly 90 total CNC machines on the floor.
Ray Gaudette, Seyer’s Director of Operations and a 19-year company veteran who worked his way up from machinist to the executive team, credits HERMLE’s precision with fundamentally changing how Seyer approaches complex aerospace work. “They’re able to eliminate some other operations we had,” he says. “Maybe before we used a couple different machines, even grinding or post-machining operations, that now can be done in one operation on the HERMLE machine because of its ability to hold tolerances.”