This month Midwest Rubber celebrates one of our valued and most longstanding employees, Bill Bittner. For 52 years, Bill has embodied the innovative and collaborative spirit that this company was founded on. Bill’s experience designing and fabricating automotive parts goes back to his high school days.
A Little History
As a teenager, one of Bill’s favorite pastimes was building custom cars. Like many high school students, Bill and his friends didn’t have much cash to spare, so they built a lot of their own parts. Bill spent many hours searching junkyards and surplus stores for parts for the Chrysler Hemi he was building. His natural affinity for seeking solutions to automotive challenges proved a perfect complement when he began his career at Midwest Rubber.
Bill found his niche at Midwest Rubber very quickly. He loved the challenge of designing rubber parts that fit the necessary application, functioned well and endured over time. Several years into his career, Bill was presented with a new challenge: to create a gear shift boot that not only functioned well, but looked really good, too. Bill was charged with developing the model of the shift boot, as well as identifying the process that would be used to create the tools to produce the final part. After months of trial and error, Bill developed a process that produced a gear shift boot that looked and performed just like cut and sewn leather. The final product even fooled automotive engineers, and saved our customer over $1 million in the first year of production!
What We Say About Bill
Bill is an integral part of our team. His dedication, perseverance, vision and artistic ability are true assets to Midwest Rubber. We are incredibly fortunate that Bill has been on the team for so many years, through significant times in our company’s history.
What Bill Says About Us
“It has been a pleasure working with the automotive engineers on various projects over the years. Two projects that stand out to me are developing the shift boots for the Dodge Ram and the Neon. The teams for each of those projects were true professionals and a joy to work with. When I look back over my 52 years in the industry, it’s working with great people like them and my wonderful coworkers that makes it such a pleasure to come to work each day.”
Congratulations on your success in the industry, Bill. Midwest Rubber is proud to call you family!