BY MICHAEL BOSTIAN
SALISBURY POST

Charles Taylor’s father built a multimillion- dollar brick manufacturing business in Salisbury’s backyard, but the family has been making ceramics for even longer — 280 years.

Taylor Clay Products makes and sells more than 50 million bricks each year and ships them to major construction projects all over the country. But their most impressive bragging rights might come from the process that makes exhaust gases released by the manufacturing process cleaner than the air you breathe everyday, Taylor said. Or you might pick the fact that the company has the country’s largest robot in use.

Taylor says the company has to reject twice as many orders as it accepts because they are making brick as fast as possible. The company has even turned down orders to make brick for the American embassy in Russia and the Saudi Arabian government

Charles’ father opened Taylor Clay Products in 1948. Taylor, 53 and now president of the company, took over in 1992 after his father died and he has since rebuilt and remodeled most of the facility.

Taylor, who has a degree in ceramics engineering from Clemson University, claims the business is one of the most modern brick manufacturing plants in the country and he takes pride in having helped design the machinery that makes the plant so efficient.

Taylor Clay employs about 63 people — none of which are salesmen — and they only experience about 1 percent turnover each year. That’s because they are one big family, Taylor says.

There are no salesmen working for Taylor Clay because the company relies heavily on distributors to sell the 3,200 variations of brick they manufacture and they work closely with contractors to make what the job calls for.

“Even if we slow down, we don’t lay people off,” he said. “We guarantee people 40 hours.”

The employees at the plant are as diverse as the bricks they make. Forty percent of the workforce at the Peeler Road factory is Hispanic, 12 percent is black and there are four people over 75 years old manning the machinery and working with architects to hammer out production details.

The kilns, or large ovens that dry, heat and cool the bricks, are two of the most efficient in the world and raised worker productivity by 20 percent when they were installed,Taylor said. They operate at temperatures approaching 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Because they are some of the fastest kilns in the world, bricks can be made on Monday morning and shipped out Wednesday morning, Taylor said. That’s incredible turnaround, he said, because most other brick plants take much longer to finish an order.

One kiln, a German model, was purchased in 1995 and the other, a French one that was put in last year, was the first of its kind to be set up anywhere. It usually takes between nine months and a year to have a French kiln in place and operating, but Taylor Clay was cooking bricks in just six months.

They use only natural gas in the firing process and have a unique “scrubber” system that turns harmful exhaust into hot air. Before exhaust gases make it to the smokestack located just a few yards from the plant, they travel through a bed of limestone which absorbs fluoride, sulfur and other potentially harmful particles and gases.

The result is 99.9 percent clean air.

“We’re running it (the scrubber) faster than we have to, just to make sure the air is clean,” Taylor said. “We’re concerned about our great-great-grandchildren.”

The German-made scrubber costs $16,000 to $18,000 per year to operate, but maintenance is minimal since there are very few moving parts. That’s good, Taylor said, since it cost nearly $1 million to install one year ago.

You could cook a turkey in 15 minutes using the air from the stack and it would be more healthy than cooking it in your own oven, Taylor said. The exhaust is that clean.

The stack is 68 feet tall and uses about 90 pounds of limestone each hour to purify the exhaust. Because it’s so large, it needs refilling only 12 times per year, Taylor said.

The company also uses the largest robot currently installed anywhere in the United States in the factory to stack the piles of bricks as they come down the production line. The size of a robot is calculated by weight, and the big, metal arm weighs 8,000 pounds.

It sits at the end of a cutting machine and is capable of stacking bricks any way workers need with just slight reprogramming. Like the rest of their machines, the robot is fenced in and will shut itself off when the gate is opened to insure workers’ safety.

Taylor said he was lucky when he bought the machine. A French company came up with the design right when he was looking to make the $1 million purchase last year. Without that improvement, he would have needed to install two smaller arms that wouldn’t have been as efficient or cost-effective, he said.

Taylor Clay’s bricks can be seen all over the country, and particularly in some of the biggest buildings in the nation’s capitol. The National Institute of Health, Ritz Hotel and Secret Service complex in Washington were built using bricks made at the Salisbury plant. Taylor Clay has shipped bricks as far away as California and Puerto Rico, but they try to stay within a 400-mile radius, just for simplicity’s sake.

“It’s too far to fly if you have problems,” Taylor said — which they rarely do, he added.

In addition, Taylor Clay donates brick to schools, YMCA branches and for other charitable causes. Any project being paid for by taxpayers also receive a reduced price, Taylor said.

But if you need brick, or think you might, in the next two years, Taylor said to get the order in now. They’re 112 years out now, and everything in stock is sold. That’s business as usual for Taylor Clay Products and nobody is complaining.

Contact Michael Bostian at 704-797-4280 or mbostian@salisburypost.com .