RLF Brands is a US manufacturer of Shopsmith combination machines for woodworking. The brand has its origins in the ShopSmith 10ER launched in the late 1940s, an immediate success with do-it-yourself homeowners. Later the brand changed hands twice before becoming dormant in 1966. Shopsmith, Inc. was founded in 1972 to resume manufacture of ShopSmith parts and products. In 2009 Shopsmith, Inc. went into bankruptcy, and reorganized as RLF Brands. RLF continues to use the Shopsmith brand name.
Origins
Shopsmith has its origins in the ShopSmith 10ER tool, a five-in-one woodworking tool for do-it-yourself consumers invented in the late 1940s by Hans Goldschmidt, an immigrant from Germany. It found a ready market among new homeowners in the period after World War II. The compact ShopSmith 10ER combined a table saw, lathe, drill press, disc sander and horizontal boring machine. It was manufactured by Goldschmidt’s Magna Engineering Corporation of San Diego, California. Successive models included additional accessories such as a bandsaw, jigsaw, jointer and belt sander. The lawn and garden tool manufacturer Yuba Power Products of Cleveland, Ohio bought Magna and the ShopSmith product line in the late 1950s. A few years later a group of Yuba employees founded Magna American Corporation and purchased the ShopSmith assets. They started manufacturing in Raymond, Mississippi, but their company ceased operation prior to 1966.
Shopsmith, Inc.
When searching for a replacement saw blade John Folkerth, a stockbroker in Dayton, Ohio, came across what was left of the company in Raymond, including the manufacturing equipment and boxes of unfilled orders for parts. He obtained investors and launched Shopsmith Inc. in 1972 to resume manufacturing in Troy, Ohio. The plan was to produce spare parts for the old tools sold by Magna and Yuba, but the company soon decided to start selling complete tools based on the popular and robust Mark V. The company moved to Dayton, Ohio in the late 1970s. Around the end of 1981 McGraw-Edison sold its power-tool division to Shopsmith, Inc.. Shopsmith liquidated the inventory and started to manufacture "Benchmark" products. In April 2005 the company reported gross annual revenues of US$13.4 million, with a net loss of US$800,000.
RLF Brands
Shopsmith filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and reorganized, at first under the name of RLF Shop. RLF Brands LLC was registered in Ohio as a Domestic Limited Liability Company by Robert L Folkerth on 1 June 2010. As of 2014 the company continued to market the Shopsmith Mark V and Mark 7 multipurpose tools, with seven different tools and various accessories.
