Sometime during the 1950s or 1960s, this firm manufactured the "Comet" bench grinder and a metal cut-off saw. The company itself, founded by Tom Smith and Clem Roles, began after World War II to sell a combined generator and welder that used war-surplus generators. They gradually expanded into other equipment useful for farmers, including drill presses and metal cut-off saws. They went into receivership during the late 1980s.

The Smith-Roles manufacturing facilities consisted of the Saskatoon factory and an adjacent foundry, known as the Blanchard Foundry. The Blanchard name was used on some of their products.

Besides their Canadian presence, they had sales office and warehouse in Minot, ND and in Wichita, KS. The North Dakota operations were already in operation when the Kansas operations were started in 1974. The American operations sold the Smith-Roles shop tools and small farm equipment: combine monitors, drill-fill augers, metal cut-off saws, tire changers and bench grinders. Smith-Roles arc welders were big sellers in Canada but were not sold in America because of import duties.

We have seen a saw badged with this name but also clearly marked, "Made in Taiwan". Please note that this website only includes machines made in North America, UK and Sweden, and so these offshore machines are outside the scope of the site.

Information Sources

• We first learned of this maker via an owwm.org posting by Kristian Wild. Information on the company history is from Darnell Hagen in the same thread.
• We have found no Canadian or American patents assigned to this company.
• A September 1987 document on the Province of Saskatchewan website containing meeting minutes of the Finance Committee contains a mention that Smith-Roles was one of many Saskatoon farm implement dealers that had recently gone out of business. A 1994 document from the same source mentions Smith-Roles as a company that left the province following the 1972 changes to the Trade Union Act and then returned to the province a couple of years later.
• Thanks to Brent Hartman for providing information on Smith-Roles' American operations. Hartman ran the Wichita operations from their 1974 beginnings. His Minot counterpart was Harvey Bosch.
• The book Breaking New Ground: a century of farm equipment manufacturing on the Canadian prairies, by Donald Grant Wetherell and Elise A. Corbet, 1993, has some information on this maker. We have only seen a brief snippet through Google Books.