A half-century of handling pressure
How a tungsten carbide manufacturer rooted in chemistry and family beat the odds
The print advertisement for Hempfield-based General Carbide touts its tungsten carbide tooling this way: “We don’t crack under pressure.”
In a way, those words also help explain how a venture founded more than 50 years ago by Premo Pappafava and now led by his daughter grew from a one-employee company in 1968 to a firm with 250 workers and $45 million in sales globally.
To get there, it has weathered recessions and upheaval in economic markets — some half a world away.
Mona Pappafava-Ray, its president and CEO, said her late father was a driven but personable engineer with a booming voice who played football in college. He insisted on growing the company, even in a recession, yet also understood the importance of keeping it all in perspective.
That’s why his list of business “truths” amassed over the years includes not only tips like “pick up the phone on the first ring,” “learn everything you can” and “treat everyone well — you never know when you may be reporting to one of them,” but also this: “Without exception, play golf on Thursdays.”
General Carbide Corp., with its semifinished and finished tooling, touches industries from oil and gas to automobile manufacturing. Its founder, the son of Italian immigrants and a graduate of Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University), had the stomach for risk and even setbacks, his daughter said.
That trait became a strength for a company that she said still proudly views itself as a family business.
“I do look at failure a little bit differently,” said Ms. PappafavaRay, 56. “We’ve done things before that haven’t worked out, we’ve gone in directions that haven’t worked out, picked a market that didn’t work out, bought a machine that didn’t work out, whatever.”
At those moments, she can recall her father pushing forward through similar ups and downs, such as a 1980s decision to buy land and put up a building in South Carolina, when everyone was moving south. Though it didn’t pan out, it eventually enabled him to bolster up his Pennsylvania operations.
“My dad was extremely smart, extremely capable,” she said. “If he was all of those wonderful things and he made a mistake like that, then I’ve never felt I couldn’t try something.”
General Carbide ships custom products to dozens of countries as close as Canada and as far away as
China, South Korea and Australia.
The company’s essence is rooted in the periodic table of elements, a tabular arrangement in chemistry based on atomic number. The topic baffles some but is one that Ms. Pappafava-Ray slips in and out of with ease.
Tungsten on the periodic chart is a “W” for Wolfram, she said. Tungsten Carbide is “WC,” meaning tungsten with carbon. “It’s carburized,” she explained.
General Carbide buys elemental powders and mixes them into grades or recipes of carbide power, using a binder such as cobalt or nickel, or a combination.
“We take that and we press it. It becomes like a chalk,“she said. ”We’ll machine that roughly into the shape that we are eventually going to make into a tool.”
It’s then put into a furnace, she said, to be heated and hardened.
After that, it is ground or otherwise honed for a specific use.
The company’s tooling is found in both the exploration and delivery sides of the oil and gas industry.
“If you think about a rotary drilling head that’s drilling for oil and gas, there’s these little black things that stick out,” she said. “That’s actually diamond. But the diamond is being held by substrate that you saw being made at our plant.”
The car in your driveway also may have been built with help from one of her company’s tools.
“We make the tooling that makes the parts that go into automobiles, whether it’s the engine or the brakes,” she said.
Born in 1926, founder Premo Pappafava was a coal miner’s son. He enlisted in the Air Force and enrolled in Carnegie Tech, where he graduated in 1948 with honors in chemical engineering.
He married Lorraine Beddick, and they raised two daughters, Mona and younger sister Marcy.
He built a successful career as an engineer, but then set off on his own — founding General Carbide with one employee and seven grades of powder he had formulated, the essence of his metallurgical venture.
A publication celebrating the company’s 50th anniversary in July 2018 said he founded the venture with a second mortgage.
Mona, like other children, had all kinds of career ambitions, even to become an actress. But from an early age, she also helped out with the family business.
Her dad supported a variety of charitable causes and in 2000 received the Salt and Light award, sponsored by the Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Greensburg. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story about the award noted that it was not unusual for the owner to show up with homemade gnocchi and sauce for the staff.
He died from cancer in 2002 at age 75.
Mona, herself a CMU graduate, went to work for the company in 1986. In 1997, she was named president.
In her office — just down the hall from a shaping room where products are being made — she talked about juggling demands of family and business. She said her father was a lovehim-or-hate him character who believed in feeding the business first before taking profit from it.
Ms. Pappafava-Ray said she, like her father, has always resisted layoffs, even in downturns. She and other top salaried employees took pay cuts rather than lay workers off in the most recent recession, and after a period of four-day work weeks, the company rebounded.
The workers, in turn, have shown her empathy. She recalled that when her mother became ill, they avoided sending her work email to give her the space to deal with her mother’s declining health.
“We treat each other very much like a family,” she said.