Heavy

, Alberta -- Several times a day, factory workers in silver suits and dark visors cluster like knights in armor around a medieval caldron, preparing a white-hot metal brew.

Sparks spray as one of them ladles a sample of 3,000-degree steel from a giant bucket. Then the bucket tips, sending a brilliant stream of liquid into a flaming mold.

The ritual in

's factory near Edmonton is called a pour. It results in products such as jumbo-size steel teeth that do punishing duty on gigantic shovel machines in northern strip mines.

Esco managers don't mind that each tooth, or point, may wear out in two or three days. In fact, they like it that way.

That's because

specializes in "wear parts," ground-engaging tools whose lifetimes are limited, much like expendable cartridges that drive printer makers' profits. The 97-year-old heavy-equipment manufacturer could be considered an anachronism in its hometown, known for green industries.

"Esco's one of the best-kept secrets in Portland," said

, president of the company's engineered products group, "especially when you consider the economy and the jobs we provide."

Esco, which still pours steel in a Northwest Portland foundry dating from 1913, is anything but a has-been in terms of business expansion. Amid Oregon's high unemployment, the company has hired nearly 200 people in Portland this year. In an era of services and outsourcing, Esco remains a local heavy-industry manufacturer, employing about 900 in Portland out of its global work force approaching 4,700.

Esco is privately held, owned by a handful of families, with a major share going to

, grandson of the founder. Managers don't disclose annual sales, which are probably below $1 billion. Collins said the company aims to repeat a recent trend of doubling revenues every five years.

Collins, Esco's former corporate secretary and general counsel, said the company has installed an independent board of directors and has taken other steps so it could go public at any time. "If we were operating as a public company today," he said, "we would meet New York Stock Exchange or SEC requirements for independence."

Swigert is a Harvard man like Ernest, his father, who headed

, and Fred, Hank's uncle, who chaired Esco's board. Hank Swigert remains on the board at 80. As chairman from 1979 to 2003, Swigert oversaw Esco as it bought companies with gritty names such as Bucyrus Blades, Impulse Hydraulics and Heflin Steel.

The hulking plant in Nisku is another acquisition, bought in 2005. Collins, who switched from the legal side to an operations role in 2007, remembers the

for bad morale, terrible quality and late deliveries in those early days.

Previous management was dictatorial, said Randy Green, of Esco global foundry support.

Esco turned the plant around. "Today," Collins said, "that facility produces at more than three times the output rate it did in 2006."

The plant's work force hasn't changed much, he said, but attitudes and performance have. Many of the 112 workers are immigrants from Punjab, India. Pride in their work shows in suggestions they post on an "idea board" placed prominently on the factory floor.

One employee suggests work procedures be written in both English and Punjabi. Another suggests running a wire up a wall to eliminate a tripping hazard. The month's best idea nets an employee a prime parking spot, a precious perk in a city with windy subzero winters.

Temperatures sink even lower in Alberta's northern

, where parts snap and lubricants congeal as gigantic shovel machines claw out tarry glop, loading 400-ton truckloads for processing into crude oil.

"Esco makes everything that contacts the dirt and wears out," said Mark Mallory, the company's vice president of North American sales. "We make a whole lot more than that, but that's what we're known for globally."

In doing so, Esco strikes a fine balance. It strives to make durable products that outlast those of its competitors. But ultimately, like blades on a razor, Esco's ground-engaging parts wear out. Repeated replacements generate Gillette-like profits.

Oil-sand conditions are so abrasive that customers such as

and

repeatedly push Esco to improve products. "We're constantly experimenting with new materials," Mallory said, "like tungsten carbide and chromium carbide."

For

, Esco makes screens for huge cylinders known as rotary breakers that spin continuously like cement mixers, sifting tar sand for processing into crude. Opening a rotary breaker every few months to change parts can cost $2 million, including downtime expenses measured in thousands of dollars a minute. Therefore Shell asks Esco to harden one part and soften another, so everything wears out at once.

"We made a lot of investment in the

to become the predominant supplier of wear parts," Mallory said. "It's going to be a $50 million business before too long."

And that's only one of dozens of initiatives the company is pursuing globally, often in developing countries hungry to tap new resources.

In Portland, Esco maintains a battery of almost 100 engineers constantly on the prowl for better ways of building things and gouging riches from the ground. Framed patents line the staircase of company headquarters at 2141 N.W. 25th Ave. The company holds about 500 active patents, with many more pending.

Chris Carpenter, Esco product development manager, spent more than five years with other engineers developing a specialized steel tooth that locks into place on an excavator or loader bucket. Workers tested the strength of the uniquely shaped part by dropping a 3-ton weight on a prototype.

Esco veterans like to say the company recycled long before the practice was fashionable. They reuse sand in molds. They melt scrap bought from

and other suppliers.

Environmentalists see the equation differently.

"That's a new one on me, saying they're green because they use recycled metals," said Alan Septoff, research director for

, a Washington, D.C.,-based nonprofit formed to guard against destructive impacts of mining.

Like many environmentalists, Septoff hasn't encountered Esco. "Big private companies are ciphers, because disclosure requirements are so thin," he said. "If they go public, then all of a sudden they've got public filing requirements and they have to talk about environmental liabilities and risk in their SEC filings."

Esco's Portland history

Esco founder Charles Frederick Swigert began businesses that helped build the Burnside Bridge, the Bonneville Dam and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

C.F. Swigert established the Electric Steel Foundry Co. in 1913 on property once occupied by the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition. The foundry used a French-made furnace fired by electricity rather than coke, the first of its kind in the West.

Electric Steel launched the Esco trademark in 1926 and eventually made it the company name, written uppercase, as in ESCO Corp. Along with the Pacific Bridge Co., Swigert founded Hyster Co., a forklift maker that grew into a Fortune 500 company before being acquired by a Cleveland firm.

Swigert's son Ernest headed Hyster and helped found Cascade Corp., a lift-truck attachment maker. Funds from C.F.'s son Fred, who also headed Esco, and Fred's wife, Christine, helped build OMSI's first building and the museum's current quarters.

During the 1920s Esco made cast steel alloy products for the logging trade, such as the Bardon choker hook, which became an industry standard. Esco survived the Depression mainly as a jobbing foundry, making castings for sawmills and pulp and paper mills.

Women worked in Esco plants as men fought in World War II. Later the company cashed in on the construction and mining industries, developing new metallurgical technologies. It went global as early as the 1950s.

Back orders stretched up to two years during the 1960s for the company's dragline and shovel dipper buckets and teeth. Demand sank in the 1980s and soared in the '90s.

Today Esco operates in 18 countries on six continents, with more than 20 factories.

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Likewise, Wall Street analysts don't closely track private companies such as Esco.

Alexander Blanton, an

analyst in New York, knew little of Esco, but he follows

, which both competes with and buys products from Esco. Blanton noted from Esco's product line that the company seemed to have broad exposure to construction and mining-industry trends.

Caterpillar sales peaked above $50 billion in 2008 and sank in 2009. Cat's revenues have rebounded this year.

Esco's sales could be following a similar pattern, Blanton said, although its acquisitions would boost revenue figures.

Last year, Esco gained 100 percent ownership of a Brazilian joint venture. In July, Esco completed acquiring engineering and mining divisions of Swift Group, an Australian company. Also last spring, Esco won a dispute with its Australian licensee, clearing the way for direct sales there.

Though the acquisitions occur in Brazil, Australia and elsewhere, the main driver of Esco's expansion, and of the mining industry more broadly, is China. Chinese companies continue gobbling up iron ore, copper and coal.

Collins said Esco almost doubled its size, in terms of revenue, during the past five years, excluding 2009, when it conserved cash because of the recession. He said the company is back on track to double again within five years as mining explodes in developing nations.

Closer to home, across the street from Portland headquarters, workers cook molten metal on a larger scale than in the plant near Edmonton. They pour steel during two of the plant's three shifts, using a giant crane to move a massive bucket as a safety siren blasts.

"When you do it the first time, it's pretty scary," shouts plant manager Aaron Koehler over the arc furnace's din. "But you learn to be accustomed to it."

Inside the plant, one of two Esco factories in Portland, gigantic products crouch in various stages of completion. They resemble body parts of dinosaurs, as if arrayed for a Jurassic Park stage set.

Koehler walks past huge cast "lips" that will be fitted with adapters and teeth, forming the business end of gigantic cable shovels. In another corner, he passes a giant cutter head used for removing hard rock from waterways such as the Panama Canal.

Esco's Portland line workers earn an average of $45,500 a year plus benefits. More than 45 percent of North American employees have worked a decade or more with the company, whose U.S. workers are nonunion. Anniversaries of 20, 30 or 35 years are common.

"There's got to be something that's keeping them around," Collins said.

The son of a former Esco chief executive, Collins worked for the company before college as a flogger and grinder, using a sledge hammer and grinding machines to remove excess metal from molded parts. He returned to Esco after law school, business school and work a Portland lawyer.

While Esco plans formidable expansion, it's running into a buzz saw of competition.

Managers are used to local competition from

, an even older Portland company that also makes chain for dragline buckets. But a growing number of global competitors are "coming up the food chain," Collins said. Manufacturers in China and elsewhere produce knockoff Esco products vigorously pursued by the company's lawyers.

And

, the Japanese industry giant, is about to come after Esco, according to Tokyo's Nikkei Weekly newspaper. So far Komatsu has been unable to supply many of the profitable wear products of the sort Esco makes, the Nikkei reported recently.

"To address this shortcoming," the Nikkei said, "Komatsu invested 1 billion yen -- more than $12 million -- to build specialized plants in Indonesia and China."

Collins remains unfazed. "We have plans in place to respond to that competition that will allow Esco to retain the No. 1 position globally in mining ground-engaging tools," he said.

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