INTEGRA Engineered Products – Interview with Gord Britton, CEO & Co-Founder

Hello, I’m Gord Britton, I am the CEO and co-founder of INTEGRA Technologies. Today, I am going to talk about INTEGRAs engineered products that we’ve been developing for the past 30 years. What i’ve come to understand is our customers needs for engineered products is growing. It is a mature industry with lots of challenges. With the mature industry, with ongoing maintenance, problems occur. We’ve been at this industry for over 30 years. We’ve developed a lot of experience and and a lot of know-how on how to solve the problems in this industry.

INTEGRA started in 1986 under a former name, Flexitallic Services. During that time, we worked with a customer that experienced a serious bolting failure that resulted in loss of production, fire and explosion. We were involved with analyzing the root cause of that failure, determining it to be a bolting problem. From that led to the beginning of INTEGRA in the development of hydraulic bolt tensioning as a solution to providing control bolting preventing that occurrence again. Over the following decades, we built upon our knowledge of hydraulic hydraulic stud tensioning to develop our own bolt tensioner. We wanted a tensioner that was even faster and safer and more reliable, more compact to fit on a variety of flanges so that customers can utilize the technology on a variety of applications. We took all that knowledge to develop the TALON™ Auto-Retract Tensioner (ART), which is now seen by many customers as the best-in-class tensioner in the market.

We’ve also looked at where the customers said, “Wow, we love this technology as a maintenance tool to disassemble a flange but can we have it as a permanent structure of our flange so that it’s even faster? So that led to the development of our BlackHawk™ Hydraulic Nuts. The BlackHawk™ Hydraulic Nut replaces the existing nut and is now basically a self-tightening nut which is the fastest way and more accurate way to assemble a flange.

These massive plants that produce the products that the world needs have thousands of flanges and, during maintenance cycles, many of them must be taken apart and the taking apart part of the cycle of a maintenance cycle is often overlooked. It is very complex and often where problems occur. So, within this complex problem we created a simple solution and that is a Velocity Washer™. The Velocity Washer™ is inserted under the nut and, with a very quick turn of the wrench, the nut is loosened and you’re able to quickly and safely disassemble a flange. It is an elegant and marvelous product.

I have been working in this industry for a long time. I love this industry, I love engineering, I love learning, I love ways to further understand the issues and solving problems. It is infectious, and I think that has become infectious to our organization. We have a fantastic engineering and service group that shares that passion to solve the problems for our customers – because this industry is important. Society needs it – and INTEGRA helps make it safer and more reliable.