Gleason Corporation
[1] It has manufacturing plants in the US, Britain, India, China, Switzerland and Germany, and sales offices in those and additional countries.Gleason's importance lies in gear manufacturing — especially in building the machine tools that themselves cut the teeth.Planers and indexing heads had been combined before, but never in the winning form factor that Gleason created specifically for gears.After engineers at Packard developed spiral bevel gears, Gleason pioneered the machine tools to mass-produce them (with automotive differentials being the primary market).In December 1999, it agreed to be acquired by its chairman and chief executive, the senior management, the Gleason Foundation, and private equity firm Vestar Capital Partners.
