Sean C. Morgan
Parts manufactured in Sweet Home today keep machines running across the world, thanks to what started 15 years ago as a two-man operation on Main Street.
Radiator Supply House has expanded to 48 employees since then. lLast year the company outgrew its original location next door to O&M Tire and moved onto the site of the former Clear Lumber mill.
“We moved to Sweet Home and started the company in 2003,” said owner Will Garrett. On Labor Day last year, they moved. “We’d outgrown that facility where we were at.”
Radiator Supply House cele-brated its move Saturday, June 16, with an open house.
The company is in the business of cooling – engines. It produces radiators, oil coolers, hydro coolers and turbo coolers. Its main niche is in semi trucks and heavy construction, mining and agricultural machinery.
RSH is managed by brothers Will and Ryan Garrett, who grew up in Midland, located in the Klamath Falls area. They moved to Sweet Home from the Medford area, where their father, Mitch Garrett, had purchased and operated Medford Radiator, a repair shop, in 1998.
Garrett said he and his brother grew up poor, but “things definitely got better” after his father began running the shop.
The family had long had a dream of running a warehouse and manufacturing facility, Garrett said, and a relative stepped in to help make that happen.
That family member, Herb McKillop, had purchased Radiator Supply House’s original location from Gary and Mary Betts, who own and operate More Logs, Inc., and constructed the two-story building in the 4400 block of Main Street.
In 2002, the brothers started talking with McKillop, who said he would make it happen if they moved to Sweet Home and used the Main Street property. The brothers partnered with their father and McKillop and they moved to Sweet Home to start the business. Will and Ryan Garrett purchased and continue to own the property occupied by Radiator Supply House.
Ryan Garrett worked in the office, his brother said. Will Garrett and his wife hit the road, from California to Seattle, Wash., to Boise, Idaho, and started knocking on doors.
“We have a make-it-happen attitude,” Garrett said.
“This doesn’t happen without our employees, our core group of people.”
The company’s culture is more family-like than a typical work environment, he said.
The company provides direct replacement parts and custom cooling for machinery, Garrett said. About 10 years ago, RSH began collecting parts from a variety of machinery. It’s all cataloged and stored in a sort of “bone yard.”
When the business receives an order, employees can pull the part and use it as a reference to manufacture brand new parts.
That’s especially useful when the original manufacturer discontinues parts for the machinery. Garrett’s company can produce a replacement.
Garrett said his brother is known as the “Wizard of Radiators” and can rattle off the most obscure parts numbers.
The system also cuts down the amount of time a piece of machinery is offline.
The machinery may have a small leak, Garrett said. The owner can continue to milk it along while Radiator Supply House fabricates a replacement part.
Radiator Supply House also fills larger orders, parts used in machinery across the world. Garrett said RSH parts are probably in every country where there is machinery.
In the past 60 days, he’s seen orders destined for Nigeria, Germany and Puerto Rico, he said.
“I don’t see everything. I see a small fraction of what happens.”
For years, the business has also fabricated parts for customers who are working on hot rods or other projects, which has evolved into a performance and extreme custom line of products destined for street rods, diesel performance and high-performance trucks called Icebox.
“Since 2016, when we came up with the name, it’s just lit up and caught fire,” Garrett said.
Marketing Director Wes Collins said the company needed to name the product, so they came up with the name “Icebox.”
It’s caught on and has become part of the high-performance industry landscape to the point that when they did a show a couple of weeks ago, everyone had heard of Icebox and that it had been around for years.
The products are showing up in reality TV shows like “Diesel Brothers” and “Street Outlaws,” Garrett said. They’ll be part of upcoming episodes of “Vegas Rat Rods” on Discovery Channel.
One episode will feature Evel Knievel’s old wheelie car, Garrett said. Radiator Supply House’s Charlie Stewart built a hidden radiator into the ballast tank.
Just last week, Collins and Garrett met and signed a deal with Dave Kindig to do a couple of builds for “Bitchin’ Rides,” a Velocity channel reality program.
RSH employees get into the reality show action themselves, and they can be seen on the company’s Facebook page competing with each other ahead of this year’s Sema Show in Las Vegas.
Eighteen employees are building custom radiators to fit antique grills, which are unusually shaped, Garrett said. They’re in the design phase now. They can begin building them on Aug. 1, and they must finish by Sept. 15 before the Sema Show, where they will be judged by trade journalists and cast members from reality shows.
This week, the Garretts are hosting the Used Parts Network’s annual convention in Sweet Home. It’s a loose group of businesses across the United States that meet up annually to meet up and network. The group began meeting in the 1980s.
Different businesses volunteer each year to host the convention, and this year, more than 200 visitors will be in Sweet Home, hosted by RSH, enjoying a variety of activities.
Garrett said his family loves being in Sweet Home. As RSH outgrew its original location, the partners considered taking it to Texas.
“We told the city we’d never move if they got behind us,” Garrett said, and the city did. City Manager Ray Towry and the City Council have been supportive.
Members of the community told the Garretts they appreciate them and don’t want them to leave. Moving to Texas made some business sense. It would split the country in half as far as shipping. There were some tax incentives to moving, but they couldn’t go.
“How can we leave a community like this?” Garrett said. “We love this area.”
He said he thinks it’s cool to be part of a tight-knit community like Sweet Home and the company does its best to hire its employees from Sweet Home.
When they first moved, “we wanted to move back to Medford,” where springtime isn’t as wet, Garrett said, but the view from their home, on a hill overlooking the Foster area, helped win him over. Then there’s the community itself.
“You see anything come up in the community, you see this community get together,” Garrett said. “The little differences people have, they’re gone.”