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2024 marks the 60th anniversary of Van Mark Products! |
Founded in 1964, Van Mark has been building premium quality trim brakes, slitters and other roofing and siding tools for the professional installer, rental store, handyman and DIY’er. The patent for the first portable bending brake was issued to our founder, who then began manufacturing the Trim-A-Brake. Van Mark has been improving and enhancing the design and capabilities of our family of tools ever since.
After years of success with our slide lock trim brakes for the siding industry, we took the industry by storm yet again when we released our game changing Mark I Cam operated brake. This new brake design offered the ability to create a 180 degree bend, or “hem” in the material for the first time on a portable brake. The self-adjusting cam-lock system and the versatility of the brake was well received in the market and contractors love them.
Years later, we raised the bar again on what a jobsite portable brake is capable of when we released our family of Industrial brakes. We saw the need to bend heavier materials, most often for metal roofing projects or metal buildings. But traditional trim brakes just weren’t intended for this use. So, we took our already proven cam-lock brake design and beefed it up to allow for jobsite bending, cutting, and forming of up to 24 gauge grade-D steel.
Based in metro Detroit, we have been able to leverage a wealth of local manufacturing resources and suppliers that allow us to build the highest quality tools. The kind of tools you want to buy. This is something we take very seriously and have since our inception. We’re proud to be designed, manufactured, and assembled in the USA, and more specifically, Detroit, the Motor City.
When we began, we knew we were onto something, and while our products have evolved over the last six decades, our core principles haven’t. Build legacy quality tools that people can afford, that can pay for themselves, that require minimal maintenance and adjustment, are portable and capable, and can be repaired by the user while on the jobsite if anything were to happen. We have managed to meet these criteria and often exceed them, for six decades. Plus, it was important to us to continue to offer replacement parts or part solutions to maintain even our oldest tools, even to this day.
And for the entire year, we will be celebrating 60 years by giving away 60 different prizes in our sweepstakes like brakes, accessories, and swag over the course of 2024. So please follow us on social or sign up for our newsletter to make sure you know about all of our giveaways and prizes. You won’t want to miss a chance to win.
Important events throughout Van Mark's 60 years!
1964 - Van Mark Founded
- Van Mark Products Inc. was founded. Changing the way metal is formed on the jobsite forever.
- Ford unveiled the Mustang; the car sparked the pony-car revolution.
- The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of JFK.
- The Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo is captured.
- The Mariner spacecraft launches and heads toward Mars to photograph and study the atmosphere.
1960's
- MLK Jr. leads the civil right march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama. Then is assassinated a few years later by James Earl Ray.
- The mini-skirt starts a fashion trend.
- The Star Trek TV series begins.
- Rolling Stone magazine begins publishing.
- President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act.
- NASA sends Apollo 11 to the moon, and Armstrong and Aldrin become the first humans to set foot on another celestial body in our solar system.
- Sesame Street, a children’s education, and entertainment show debuts.
1970's
- The Beatles break up.
- The world loses Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin to drug overdoses.
- Charles Manson and four of his followers are sentenced to death.
- Walt Disney World in Florida opens.
- The video game Pong arrives at arcades for the first time.
- The Watergate scandal ensues. Nixon resigns shortly after.
- The Munich Olympic games is marred by tragedy when 11 Israeli athletes are captured and killed by members of Black September.
- The WTC Twin Towers in New York open for business and hold the title for the tallest buildings until the Sears tower in Chicago opens a year later.
- Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne officially form Apple Computer Inc.
- The first Star Wars film hits theaters. (Today we call it “A New Hope”)
- The Daytona 500 stock car race debuts in Daytona Florida.
1980's
- The Compact Disc (CD) begins to appear in record stores, sounding the end of phonograph records.
- Mount Saint Helens erupts in one of the greatest volcanic explosions ever recorded in North America.
- The first launch of the space shuttle Columbia ushers in the era of reusable spacecraft. Sister spacecraft Challenger explodes after liftoff 5 years later.
- Music Television (MTV) debuts with the broadcast of “Video killed the radio star” by the Buggles.
- The remains of the Titanic are finally located at a depth of 13,000 feet.
- Microsoft launches the Windows operating system.
- Natural disasters abound, Chernobyl melts down, and the Exxon Valdez runs aground and spills 10 million gallons of crude oil.
- The birth of the World-Wide Web comes a few years after the first data transmissions on the newly created Internet.
- The Berlin wall falls.
1990's
- The Hubble Space Telescope is launched and placed into orbit around the Earth.
- Iraq invades neighboring Kuwait sparking the Persian Gulf War.
- The United States wins the first Women’s World Cup of Soccer.
- Nirvana’s Nevermind is released bringing with it the new term “Grunge”, Dr. Dre goes solo releasing his debut album The Chronic.
- Jeff Bezos launches an online bookstore ushering in a revolution in shopping as it grows and becomes Amazon.com.
- We are introduced to our newest lifelong pals when the popular sitcom Friends debuts.
- The Three Gorges Dam in China begins construction while displacing 1.3 Million people and permanently devouring countless rare and architectural and archaeological sites.
- The Alfred P. Murrah Federal building is heavily damaged by a homemade bomb killing 168 people.
- O.J. Simpson is acquitted of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
- Pixar ushers in a new era of animated films and storytelling when they release the box-office hit, Toy Story.
- J.K. Rowling publishes the first book in the Harry Potter series, making us all question which house we’d end up in at Hogwarts.
- The world loses a shining star when Princess Diana is killed in a car crash in Paris.
- Sergey Brin & Larry Page launch the answer to all our questions when Google goes live.
- Bill Clinton becomes the second U.S. President to be impeached due to his entanglement with Monica Lewinsky but is later acquitted.
- Hurricane Mitch strikes Central America killing more then 9000 and leaving nearly one million homeless.
2000's
- The Y2K scare that threatened to cause a societal collapse ends up being a lot of fear over nothing.
- The International Space Station (I.S.S.) goes online and welcomes its first resident crew.
- The Nation, and the World mourn the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killing nearly 3000 innocent people.
- Apple introduces a way to carry all of your music in your pocket with the launch of the iPod.
- The Euro becomes the sole legal currency in 12 European countries.
- The space shuttle Columbia breaks up upon re-entry killing all seven astronauts due to a fractured heat shield that was damaged during launch.
- Facebook goes live for the first time, forever changing the way we interact with other people.
- Hurricane Katrina destroys much of New Orleans after the levee system fails, while also affecting a larger swath of the Gulf Coast area.
- Pluto’s status as the 9th planet is revoked and was officially reclassified as a dwarf planet.
- Netflix begins streaming media through the internet, forever changing the way we access TV shows and Movies.
- Apple reinvents the mobile phone and the portable music player with the launch of the iPhone while ushering in the trend toward “always with you” mobile computing.
- The Great Recession is triggered by a subprime mortgage crisis that affected the U.S. economy while the impact quickly spread around the world.
- Barack Obama becomes the first African American to hold the office of the President of the United States.
- The brilliant but troubled “King of Pop” Michael Jackson is found dead from a lethal combination of sedatives and anesthetics.
2010's
- Spotify comes to the U.S. changing the way we consume music more so than the products it competed against.
- Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer Inc., passes away calling into question the fate of Apple as a whole. Though in hindsight those fears seem to have been for nothing.
- Osama Bin Laden is killed during a successful Navy SEAL raid after years of living in hiding.
- Angry Birds became a massive phenomenon taking over tablet and phone screens everywhere.
- Haiti & Japan were both hit with the largest earthquakes ever recorded. The 7.1 magnitude quake in Haiti and the 9.1 magnitude quake and subsequent tsunami left thousands dead, as well as triggered the failure of the Fukushima nuclear plant.
- The Oculus Rift opens up pre-orders on Kickstarter bringing Virtual Reality (VR) systems into the spotlight.
- Edward Snowden leaks thousands of classified NSA documents related to a project called PRISM.
- Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president dies at the age of 95.
- Peter McIndoe launches his satirical conspiracy theory “Birds aren’t real” suggesting that birds are spy robots developed by the government to spy on citizens. This was a joke to demonstrate how these crazy theories can take hold in the public consciousness.
- SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, lands its first reusable rocket during testing.
- The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed 11 people and released 168 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
- Donald Trump is elected as President of the United States.
- The cinematic public begins the long road to Superhero Fatigue with the release of the first Avengers movie from Marvel Studios.
- After winning gold medals in the 100m and 200m in three consecutive Olympics, Usain Bolt then broke the 100m world record by more than a full tenth of a second, the largest margin since the implementation of electronic timing.
60 Years of Quality
- As Van Mark reflects on their 60 years of innovation, durability, and exceeding expectations in the roofing and siding industries, they celebrate their 60th anniversary by running a year-long prize filled sweepstakes as a thank you to their customers and dealers for six decades of continued support. Turning toward to the next 60 years, Van Mark plans to continue to innovate and provide the highest quality brakes, slitters, saw tables, and other construction tools while still offering technical and replacement parts support for all of their tools bought in this decade or any other.
- Happy 60th Anniversary Van Mark!