BendPak Brand Guidelines: A 1965 Machine Shop, a Pipe Bender & Santa Paula Lifts

A precision machine shop before it was a lift maker.

BendPak did not begin as a lift company. The company says it started in 1965 as a small precision machine shop in Southern California, founded by Don Henthorn under the name Quality Machine & Associates, or QMA. Fleet Maintenance reported in 2024 that Henthorn had worked in the aerospace industry after moving to Simi Valley in 1959, and that the shop he started in 1965 supplied parts to several aircraft makers. The company names Rocketdyne, Rockwell and Hughes Aircraft among its early customers.

The turn to cars came through tools. According to Fleet Maintenance, Henthorn invented the 5ivePak, a ball-joint replacement tool for front ends that combined a coil-spring compressor, a U-joint press and a gear puller, and he patented a MacPherson strut spring compressor and a hand-held hydraulic tailpipe extender. As emissions rules tightened in California in the late 1970s, he put more of the business into muffler-shop equipment.

The product that changed the company, by its own account, was a hydraulic exhaust tube bender for muffler shops, developed in 1979 and introduced at a trade show that year. It became known as the Burgundy Bullet. The company says the name followed: “Bend” from the pipe benders and “Pak” from the 5ivePak, joined as Bend-Pak. The hyphen was dropped in a refresh in 2005, giving the BendPak name used today.

From pipe benders to lifts.

Lifts followed in the early 1980s. The company says its first four-post lift arrived around 1983. Fleet Maintenance described that first model as a fully mechanical lift with chains, sprockets and a single large electric motor; after about 200 were sold it was dropped in favour of simpler hydraulic and chain-driven designs.

From there the range widened. BendPak’s own history lists two-post, four-post, alignment, scissor, parking and heavy-duty lifts, and the company says it moved to Santa Paula, in Ventura County, in 1995. It launched Ranger in 1997 as a separate brand for wheel-service and general shop equipment, including tyre changers and wheel balancers. Further brands followed: QuickJack portable lifts, MaxJax, Autostacker parking lifts and Cool Boss air coolers among them. Work Truck Online listed the group’s brands in July 2023 as Ranger, Autostacker, QuickJack, Cool Boss, GrandPrix, MaxJax, Dannmar and Ergochair, with products from lifts and wheel-service equipment to pipe benders, air compressors, brake lathes and rolling work seats.

The business has stayed in private hands. Work Truck Online called it privately held in 2023, as did Fleet Maintenance in 2024, and the company describes itself as American-owned. In 2022 Henthorn handed day-to-day leadership to Jeff Kritzer, who became president and chief executive after working alongside him for about four decades, the company says; Henthorn became chairman emeritus.

The pipe-bending heritage still sits in the catalogue. The company describes pipe benders and specialty tools as part of its heritage, while car lifts became the centre of the business.

How the trade shows itself.

Garage equipment is sold to people who already know what a lift or a tyre changer should do, so the makers’ own material tends to show the machines at work. The usual picture is a two-post lift with a car raised to head height in a clean, well-lit workshop, the columns and arms set against pale floors and painted walls, with a technician underneath for scale.

Wheel-service equipment has its own look. Tyre changers and wheel balancers are typically shown as compact cabinets in strong body colours — reds, blues and greys recur across the trade — with a wheel mounted and the controls in view. Alignment systems are often shown through their targets or sensors clamped to the wheels and a screen nearby, and brake testers through rollers set into the workshop floor.

Much of the selling happens face to face. Makers present their ranges at trade fairs such as Automechanika in Frankfurt and at national shows, and most sell through dealer and installer networks rather than directly, so dealer locators, installer programmes and training centres feature prominently on their websites. Certification marks and named standards also appear often; Rotary Lift, for example, says many of its lifts carry the certification mark of the Automotive Lift Institute, a trade body formed in 1945.

The makers in this guide include family firms, private companies and brands held inside larger industrial groups. This guide sets out what can be checked about each — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Santa Paula, Agoura Hills and Mobile.

BendPak now spreads across three sites. The company names a manufacturing and distribution centre in Santa Paula, a global headquarters in Agoura Hills, opened in 2023, and a growing campus in Mobile County, Alabama, near the Port of Mobile. Work Truck Online reported in July 2023 that the company was developing a 33-acre industrial complex there, a few miles from its expanded East Coast campus, with buildings for light manufacturing and assembly, product development and testing, and distribution; the same report said BendPak had twice expanded its Santa Paula campus in six years.

The company says the first phase of that site, named the Donald R. Henthorn Industrial Complex, opened in 2025 with a logistics and distribution centre of about 261,600 square feet that includes a showroom for customer visits, product demonstrations and training; the site is being built in phases, and the company says later phases will add to it as needed. Where individual products are made is described only in general terms: the company speaks of manufacturing in Santa Paula and of light manufacturing and assembly in Alabama, and it does not break this down by model.

The brand’s own story leans on its founder and its tools. Its history pages start with the machine shop, the Burgundy Bullet and the 5ivePak, and only then turn to lifts, and it quotes Henthorn in 1982 on needing “something a little better than everyone else” to compete from a standing start. Its founder’s line, “Build it better, stand behind it, and never stop improving it,” sits on the history page as a kind of motto. Fleet Maintenance recorded that Henthorn put the company’s success down to the claim that “we outwork everybody,” and that he prided himself on knowing the name of everyone who worked for him.

For a design guide, BendPak shows how a company name made from two early products can outlast the products themselves. Compare Rotary Lift, the Indiana lift maker that traces itself to 1925, and Challenger Lifts, another American lift brand. For this guide we use a burgundy, a steel grey and a plate silver with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep BendPak’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.