Back in 2015 the purchase of a salvage 135i BMW unknowingly started it all. Known for turbo issues this became the first order of business was fixing my new found toy. This required dropping the front subframe for better access to everything, easy task right? Well, you first have to get the car on jack stands. But wait all the jack stands are made for pre 1980 solid axle cars, not for these plastic rectangular jack points found on BMW. Owning a machine shop, and being a creative guy this became a quick fix to come up with a adapter. Step 1 done, create a solution to a problem.
So although having a product line was not the initial intention of my efforts, it ended up becoming the end result. I enjoyed the creative and problem solving process so much, and became extremely proud of how well these projects worked out that we thought, "hey, I bet other people would appreciate this too". So from there the idea of Forsvara Engineering was born. Step 2 done, have goal.
Growing up the son of tool and die maker my father, had always been a mechanically oriented person. Working on cars, houses, and the latest project was part of my childhood. I was always excited when anything broke around the house because I got to tear it apart to see how it worked then. This of course rubbed off on me, I ended up pursuing manufacturing in trade school. My grandparents on my moms side had owned and operated a carpet store. I can remember crawling around all the rolls of carpet and just thought it was the coolest thing, that they owned the entire thing. I think that entrepreneurial spirt rubbed off on me, though it skipped a generation. So after taking many machine shop courses at the trade school level I started working for several machine shops. Eventually I took college level courses and graduated with a Manufacturing Engineering degree and became a process engineer at a local aerospace manufacturing company. I loved that job, but I was young and ambitious, so I wanted more. There I learned of a newer method of cutting metal, waterjet cutting. Step 3 (or 1.5), have the means and background.
I started a waterjet job shop back in 1999 called Kerf Waterjet. After 17 years of running a successful job shop, dreams and ambitions grew and we went on to form Forsvara Engineering, LLC in 2016. It was run concurrently with our waterjet shop up until spring of 2022. Finally after 23 years of the specialty waterjet cutting business, we switched gears and are currently focusing all of our efforts on providing the best possible products and designs for reasonable prices. Everything you see here is a creation of mine to solve simple problems of my own. I was either not happy with what was available on the market, or it didn't exist, so I made it myself. Step 4, make it happen