Stainless, which has provided towers and structures for thousands of broadcasters and other businesses since 1947, will cease operations.
President Gregg Fehrman said parent company FDH Infrastructure Services has decided to discontinue the brand, which it acquired nine years ago.
“The company plans to auction off all field equipment. In addition, FDH ownership is looking to sell off all historical data on its projects over 77 years,” he wrote in an email to Radio World.
Fehrman says “60% of the [Stainless] personnel have moved on, with the remainder around until the end of the month.” He said his last day with the company will most likely be in early November.
The company cites its involvement in 15,900 projects spanning from 1947 to the present, covering over 7,250 Stainless-built structures and more than 900 towers built by others.
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In the email to its customers announcing the decision to cease operations, Stainless says ownership will “sell either copies of the documentation or exclusive rights for same documentation on each tower number. Information will not be parsed. If copies are requested, the whole file/history will be released for each tower project number. Ownership will also entertain selling all project and standards data together for one purchase price,” the email stated.
Interested parties can reach out to Fehrman at gregg.fehrman@fdh-is.com.
Long History
Stainless was founded in 1947 by Walter L. Guzewicz, Henry J. Guzewicz and Richard J. Eberle, according to its website, and built its first tower in Philadelphia for radio station WJMU. That tower was in Delair, N.J., an insulated 385-foot guyed structure topped with an RCA pylon antenna, according to the history timeline.
In 1950 the company constructed its first 500-foot towers as part of a four-tower array for KCBS (AM) in San Francisco.
In the early 1950s, Stainless designed and fabricated Empire State Building test towers for RCA. Empire’s unique mast had to be duplicated on the ground for electronic testing purposes at RCA’s facilities in Camden, New Jersey.
Stainless designed and fabricated its first 1,000-foot TV tower for General Electric in Reading, Pennsylvania. The trussed-leg tower was billed as the “home of the world’s most powerful TV station” at the time and was one of only three 1,000-foot towers in the United States.
The company designed and fabricated towers used in atomic testing in Nevada in 1955. The Type G-15-100 towers were placed at varying distances from the point of detonation.
Stainless has gone through several ownership changes. In 1999 it was purchased by SpectraSite Communications and renamed SpectraSite Broadcast Group. In 2004 the company was acquired by Don Doty and Pat Moore and renamed Stainless.
FDH acquired Doty Moore Tower Services in 2013 and acquired the assets of Stainless LLC in 2015. That acquisition included more than 7,500 structural drawings representing work Stainless had done for the radio, television, microwave and general communications industry since 1947.
At that time, FDH said that as many as half of the broadcast towers standing in the United States had been fabricated by Stainless LLC.
FDH does engineering investigation of structures and foundations, according to its website. It is headquartered in Raleigh, N.C., and has offices in Florida, Illinois, Texas and Wyoming.
The most recent entry on the timeline says Stainless celebrated “75 years of innovative tall tower design, safety and reliability” in 2022.
This article originally appeared on TV Tech sister brand Radio World.
