In 1905 the Rockford Tool Co. was founded by Levin Faust to make a small metal chuck for carving furniture. Faust invited two young tool makers, Elmer Lutzhoff and Swan Anderson, to be partners. They designed a belt sander and a buffing device for furniture manufacturers, which proved much more successful than the carving chuck had been. In 1909 they gained a neighbor in its facilities, the Rockford Milling Machine Co., owned by Oscar Sundstrand and his brother-in-law Edwin Cedarleaf. In June 1926, both companies agreed to merge into a new firm incorporated as the Sundstrand Machine Tool Company.

Sundstrand made a line of handheld sanding and rubbing machines, including models specialized for smoothing surface finishes. Paasche Airbrush Co. was the exclusive distributor for many years and some of the products were branded with the Paasche name.

In 1936, Sundstrand acquired the American Broach and Machine Company, a tool manufacturer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Between 1937 and 1939, Sundstrand introduced several new machine tools, including an automatic lathe and the successful hydraulic "Rigidmil" milling machine that was designed by Charles DeVlieg.

At some point between 1956 and 1960, the company changed its name to Sundstrand Corp. This company seems to have bought Engelberg, Inc.'s line of sanders sometime between 1959 and 1960, which Sundstrand marketed under the "Engelberg" name; Sundstrand filed a trademark for that name in 1960. They also sold the machines with Engelberg-Sundstrand and Sundstrand names.

In 1999 the Sundstrand Corp. was acquired by United Technologies Corp. of Hartford, CT, where it was part of the Stuhr Manufacturing Co. Division. Today the company is part of Bourn & Koch Machine Tool Company, which still provides support for certain models of Sundstrand lathes and mills. So far as we can tell from their website, the sander/grinder products are not supported.

Information Sources

• More information can be found at History of Sundstrand machine tool company and Sundstrand Company History. Our thanks to Robert Bernstein for bringing the history information to our attention.
• Sundstrand's own history page consistently misspells the Rigidmil name as "Rigidmill". We include the misspelling here so that web searches on the misspelled name will still find us.