About Us

Who We are

We specialize in rapidly designing and producing high quality workholding devices. Typical projects may include design and creation of collets, chucks, hydraulic arbors, mandrels, tombstone fixtures, or machining center fixtures – products designed to hold objects for machine tool processes. While we welcome single piece orders, we routinely design and produce multiple fixtures with interchangeable components.

Is your project complex? Is your engineering staff stretched to the limits? We can help you here too! While we can work from designs supplied from our customers, our team of experienced engineers will work with your team to design and implement a complete workholding solution – leaving your staff free to handle other pressing priorities.

We are a family-run company, where the owners work in the business – daily reinventing the company’s processes to better fill your needs and requirements.

We know your needs are real, your time frame is vital, and that quality is a must.

We take pride in having hundreds of satisfied customers, who come back to us time after time to fill their collet and other workholding device needs.

Industrial factory worker or service engineer operating cnc turning lather machine at factory in metal machining industry

Our History

70+ Years in the Business

In 1947, design engineer Ed Drew started Drewco Corporation, now called Drewco Workholding, in Racine, Wisconsin. Drew’s initial interest, and eventually his passion, was to innovate the process of holding parts for manufacturing, which led him to develop patented designs for chucks and collets. Today, Drewco is a full-service design and build workholding company that designs 80 percent of what it produces. Through Drewco’s 68-year history, it has become specialized in designing and building gear workholding that now encompasses 50 to 75 percent of its business.

After Drew passed away, Drewco was sold and then later purchased by Ann and Richard Pettibone in 1987 from a Michigan firm, bringing the ownership back to Wisconsin. Interestingly, there was a Pettibone family connection to Drewco in its earliest years.

Shortly after purchasing Drewco, Richard Pettibone, a mechanical engineer, began to expand the line of custom workholding products. He increased the type of both durable and perishable workholding tooling, and due to customer requests, he also added the designing and building of machining center fixtures.

A second generation of Pettibones are now with Drewco. In the last several years, two out of Richard and Ann’s four sons, who grew up on the shop floor and started out by cleaning machines as teenagers, have taken positions at the company. Ryan Pettibone joined in 2007 after attaining his business degree and is Drewco’s production manager. Andy Pettibone is Drewco’s sales project manager and an AMT Certified Manufacturing Technology Sales Engineer, who moved his sales career to Drewco in 2012.

Attributed to Gear Solutions Magazine -, et al. “Company Profile - Drewco Workholding"

About Us

Who We are

70+ Years in the Business

Contact Information

Custom Products

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