🔒Made in Maine: Simple or complex, a midcoast manufacturer is a dual threat

There’s an unlikely manufacturing hub in the small midcoast town of Georgetown.

Yet in a 17,000-square-foot space converted from a chicken processing facility, Woodex-MECO Industries Inc. has been quietly manufacturing shaft seals and wood bearings for decades. The company is the only manufacturer of its kind in the U.S.

The parts are critical to smooth operation of a variety of manufacturing machinery. Customers are in a range of processing and manufacturing fields, including agriculture, pulp and paper, chemical, marine, food and pharmaceuticals, among others. Products are custom made and designed and tested in-house.

Woodex-MECO generates $7 million a year in sales. The company had its start in Wakefield, Mass., but has been in Maine since 1961. Since 2011, it has been held by an employee stock-ownership plan.

Woodex-MECO has 25 employees, with an average tenure of 14 years. There are some with decades of experience.

One such long-term employee is the company’s president, Somchai Taesuwan, who has been working at Woodex for 33 years, ever since he graduated from Morse High School in Bath.

At a time when the decline of U.S. manufacturing has been grabbing headlines, the success of Woodex is notable, and not just because the idea of using wood to create high- performance bearings for heavy machinery may seem counterintuitive.

As the crow flies, it is not far from Bath Iron Works, which is across the Kennebec River, and Woodex-MECO Industries competes for the same workforce. But Taesuwan says the company offers a generous 401(k) package, covers 100% of health care and provides half of the deductible for health savings accounts.

The workforce includes engineers, machinists, CAD operators and entry-level laborers.

The company touts the fact that “we’ve had no layoffs,” Taesuwan says.

A site in constant motion

Taesuwan, who was named president in 2025, grew up in Georgetown. He joined the company straight out of high school, in 1992, and since then has taken just about every job on the way up, including draftsman, designer, IT manager, operations manager, GM and vice president. When the firm converted an old farm house on the property to office space, Taesuwan was painting and building cabinets.

On a recent afternoon, he gave Mainebiz a tour of the facility, which is on an old farm on Bay Point Road in Georgetown that has been home since 1983, when it moved from the nearby Robinhood neighborhood.

Wooden bearings, a product staple since the company’s founding, are made of hard maple, with wood sourced from throughout New England and upstate New York. The wood bearings are produced entirely in-house. Wood bearings are cheaper than synthetic alternatives, and sales in that area have grown.

The mechanical seals are custom-fashioned from plastic sourced from vendors. The seals are used as buffers in a range of manufacturing equipment.

The Woodex part of the building smells like sawdust and wax (which protects the wood), while the areas where plastic is shaped into seals smells more like, well, plastic.

The factory uses a mix of shiny computer-numerical cutting stations and legacy industrial tools such as bandsaws, lathes and drill presses.

Taesuwan says the team includes skilled workers who can also fix and custom make complex tools. He’s also helped institute a system of tracking every part made in the factory.

“Every piece is documented with a serial number on every part,” he says, allowing the company to track when it was produced and who made it.