About AMH
When selecting a supplier of manufacturing or service equipment, it’s imperative that you have a company with the skills and experience to provide an innovative, reliable product. Your investment must pay off, preferably over months of service.
That’s why many customers have selected American Machine & Hydraulics to provide quality equipment and fabrication tooling for metal bellows forming, metal tube end finishing and metal tube bending for almost forty years. AMH responds quickly to provide solutions, often for complex metal forming problems, which may not be available from suppliers of standard equipment.
Because of our ability to quickly adopt evolving technology, many major manufacturers have relied on AMH to solve the most difficult metal forming problems. Hundreds of companies large and small have benefitted from AMH’s creative metal tube forming solutions.
Creation Through Imagination and Faith.
Bio
I, Sammy Grimaldo was born into a humble family whose parents migrated from Mexico in the early 20s. Living in San Jose, California, our families were farm and ranch workers. Grew up living in tents. Our Mom and Dad were very hard-working parents and this inheritance has been a huge benefit to my siblings and me. I was born again, to Jesus when I was 14 years old. I then enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1953 and was discharged in 1956. I gained my welding skills during this term of duty.
In 1956 I went to work for Rocketdyne. I was hired as a tube brazer. We brazed the tubes together for the liquid thrust chambers. During my employment at Rocketdyne, I was promoted to a welder, then a welder leadman, then management. During my time in welding, I developed an attachment that would attach to the tig welding head and would add argon to the trailer of the weld puddle to ensure that no oxidation would occur. This attachment is widely used today for automatic tig welding.
I would later invent a welding rod and my welders named it Samalloy. It was used to weld exotic alloys such as Rene 41 which is a nickel base alloy. A lot of this alloy was used in the Apollo to fuel the fuel pumps. It retains strength at very high temperatures. It is subject to cracking when welded with steel parts and then heat treated. Rocketdyne was issued a patent for this rod.
Because of my contribution to the Apollo program in terms of cost savings and new designs for economical benefits, I was awarded to be one of two employees from Rocketdyne to witness the launching of Apollo 8.
Then in 1969, I joined my friend Don Levens here at AMH. I am not an educated person; I am not skilled in management. I am an entrepreneur and I rely on skilled employees and suppliers’ engineering support. Thru my faith, I am blessed with a very creative mind. Over 90 various machines have been designed here at AMH and are recorded in digital engineering drawings. None of this would be possible without my faith. Fortune 500 companies have our machines in work today. As well as small businesses. Our markets are worldwide. During my time here at AMH, I hold approx. 7 patents. I am blessed and not ashamed to walk with Jesus.
History
AMH was founded by Don Levens. Don and I met when we worked together at Rockedyne on the Apollo Space program. This was in 1956. In approx. 1958 Don Levens opened a muffler shop in Thousand Oaks Ca. When his exhaust business required most of his time, he left Rocketdyne for full time in his shop. In 1969 Don asked me to come and do some welding for him at night. It was at this time Don started to build muffler shop tube benders. Thus, the Blue Boy tube bender was born. Don, in 1969 asked me if I would join him as a minority partner. From that point up to 1973 Don became infected with lymphoma cancer. The cure in those days was nothing like today. Exactly one year later, Don passed. He laid the ground work for me and because of his efforts and skills, AMH grew to a 5 million plus company.
During the time between 1970 up to 1984 we sold approx. 7000 tube benders worldwide. I was left alone to ensure the growth and existence of AMH. At the time we started producing tube benders, we were only 4companies. Our biggest competitor was a company named Huth which later was taken over by Midas Muffler. In a very short period copycat companies entered the market with drastic price cuts and many copies of our unique design featured thanks to my dear Friend, Don Levens.
It was in approx. in 1985, I changed the course of AMH and used our design knowledge in producing machines that would cater to industrial companies away from the automotive muffler and exhaust after-market service. Since this time, AMH thru my faith, we have designed many machines to service the metal tubing and pipe market. A multi-milli-billion-dollar market. To this day we continue to serve and design machinery for markets noted on this website. Thus “ Creation Thru Imagination and Faith”.