COPING WITH COVID: Phoenix Specialty Manufacturing.

It's business as usual these days at Phoenix Specialty Manufacturing in Bamberg for the most part.

There is a greater urgency in the making of small, precision components necessary to build complex machines for industries including aerospace, agriculture and medicine, as well as an even greater sense of pride in doing so.

Phoenix has supplied original equipment manufacturers since 1907 and is playing a crucial present-day role in making parts for everything from ventilators to hand sanitizer bottle pumps.

"Phoenix is a metal stamper and we stamp parts for metal to our customers' specifications," sales manager Steve Cornforth said. "We also offer machine work and secondary operations work to those parts as well. So when the calls started coming for ventilator parts, it really wasn't any change for us at all. The parts were very similar to what we make every day.

"We did rearrange some schedules and expediate a lot of orders to get them through quicker, but it's part of what we do on a daily basis."

The company has manufactured parts for space shuttle missions, the Mars rover and the Apollo moon landing in addition to the U.S. Olympic bobsled team and numerous NASCAR teams.

Phoenix's products are shipped worldwide, and the company offers a written on-time guarantee. Its investment in raw materials and an inventory of more than 100,000 items allow it to produce parts in low to medium volumes with no additional tooling charges, according to a news release.

"We're always here, willing to help any customer," said Cornforth, in his eighth year with Phoenix. "We make parts to their prints and their specifications, and they are made in America. The material is bought in America. We are very proud of that."

The genesis of the recent focus on ventilator parts came from a simple source.

"It was our customers' idea. They needed parts," Cornforth said. "It was...