Paratech Brand Guidelines: From Swedish Rescue Saws to a Frankfort, Illinois Tool Maker

A Swedish saw and a new use for it.

Paratech did not begin as a maker of its own tools. The company says that in early 1962 its president and co-founder, Howard Leibovitz, found a new application for a Swedish gasoline-driven power saw, and that this led to a small sales and manufacturing business acting as the exclusive US agent for AB Partner of Sweden. That business was incorporated in 1963 as Mobile Saws Incorporated, which is why the company’s own pages give both 1962 (“Est. 1962”) and 1963 as its starting point.

The Swedish side of the story is documented separately. Swedish Wikipedia describes AB Partner as a chainsaw maker with offices and production in Mölndal, near Gothenburg, formed in 1955 when the rock-drill maker AB Bergborrmaskiner merged with a Gothenburg light-metal foundry. Partner began making cut-off saws around 1960, after a first customer request in 1958, and, the same article says, had great success selling them to rescue services in North America. Its saws were painted yellow, and the company was owned by the Swedish investment group Kinnevik.

Paratech says that as the US representative for Partner, Mobile Saws helped bring the K-12 Rescue Saw into fire and rescue service use, and that between 1963 and 1979 it was used by major US fire departments for emergency ventilation. The saw needed accessories, and the company says it designed and made them itself; those parts, it says, became the seed of its later manufacturing.

In 1967 the business was renamed Partner Industries of America, Inc., to match the brand it sold.

Bags, struts and forcible entry tools.

The break with Sweden came at the end of the 1970s. Swedish Wikipedia says Partner was bought by Electrolux in 1978; Paratech dates the sale to 1979, and says the new owner chose to sell through its own US branches rather than through an agent. Partner Industries of America then changed its name to Paratech, Incorporated and, the company says, began to replace the lost saw business with products of its own for the fire and rescue market. Production in Mölndal ended around 1980, when it moved to Jonsered. The Partner name itself was phased out in the 2000s, Swedish Wikipedia adds, and the K in the model names of Husqvarna’s power cutters is a legacy of the Partner saws.

What Paratech makes now is equipment for lifting, shoring and opening. Its website groups the range under structural shoring, trench shoring, vehicle stabilisation, air lifting bags, forcible entry tools, impact tools, high-angle and rope gear, rescue trailers and maritime damage control. Named lines include the Hooligan tools, the Percussive Rescue Tool, the Pry-Axe, and AcmeThread and LongShore struts, which the company says can be combined with its Tri, Bi and Mono pod systems for high-angle work.

An event notice published by Firehouse in 2012 gives a snapshot of the range at that time: rescue support systems, MAXIFORCE air lifting bags, powered impact tools, forcible entry tools, rescue air cushions, leak sealing systems and a Special Mission Tender trailer for urban search or trench rescue. The same notice described Paratech as a US company making equipment for the fire service and for military, tactical and industrial markets.

Training is part of how the company presents itself. In August 2012, Firehouse reported, Paratech and the Illinois Fire Services Institute held the second “Paratech University” heavy rescue event at Paratech’s facilities in Frankfort, after a first event that May; firefighters and military personnel from the United States and Canada attended, and participants could earn continuing-education credit at the institute. The company’s website still lists training and tactics courses alongside its products.

Rescue equipment and its makers.

Rescue and emergency medical equipment is bought by people who will use it under pressure, so the makers in this field tend to present themselves through the equipment at work rather than through lifestyle imagery. The typical brochure shows a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance, a crew lifting a patient down a narrow stair, or a basket stretcher being lowered on ropes, with the product carrying most of the colour in the frame.

That colour is often functional before it is decorative. Orange and yellow stretchers, spine boards and evacuation chairs are meant to be seen against grey streets, snow or dark water, and product photographs often make those working colours the focus of the frame, set against equipment in dark navy, graphite or black. The language is technical: load ratings, materials, fastening systems and named product lines rather than adjectives.

Training is the other stage where these brands are seen. CPR manikins laid out in rows in a training room, hydraulic cutters and spreaders opening a scrapped car at a vehicle extrication drill, and ambulances and fire trucks parked with their doors open for inspection all serve as the industry’s own advertising. The photographs are rarely staged far from that reality, because the buyers are paramedics, firefighters and fleet managers who know the work.

Trade fairs give the category its calendar. Interschutz in Hannover, RETTmobil in Fulda and EMS World Expo in the United States are where makers show new stretchers, rescue tools and vehicles side by side, and where a stand’s colours and signage have to read from across a crowded hall. For a designer, the lesson of the category is that a brand earns its look from the job its equipment does: clear colour, clear type and the product shown in use.

Made in Frankfort, the company says.

Paratech is based in Frankfort, Illinois, about 30 miles southwest of Chicago, and the company says its factory there is fully CNC-equipped with extensive moulding capability. It says all Paratech products are designed by its own engineers and that milling, turning, rubber moulding and assembly are all carried out at the Frankfort plant. It describes itself as an ISO 9001 certified manufacturer with offices in Europe and distributors around the world, and uses the line “Legendary Reliability” on its website.

The company also sells beyond the fire service. Its website names maritime, railroad, quarry, mining and pipeline customers, and says its products are used for shipboard damage control, vehicle maintenance and recovery as well as technical rescue. It also runs an air-bag check and trade-in programme for owners of its lifting bags.

The sequence of names traces that history from importer to manufacturer: Mobile Saws in 1963, Partner Industries of America in 1967, after the Swedish saw maker it represented, and Paratech in 1979, when the agency ended.

For a design guide, Paratech shows how an equipment maker’s identity can rest on its catalogue — named tools, struts and bags — rather than on a single famous product. Compare Holmatro and Hurst Jaws of Life, two other makers of rescue tools. For this guide we use a deep navy, a signal yellow and a machined steel grey with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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