The company where Akston began
JM Tool & Die was founded in 1990 by industrial entrepreneur John Morawa in Bensenville, Illinois, to serve the cold-headed fastener industry. In 2014, the acquisition of JM Die became the founding event of Akston Industries — and the operational foundation on which everything else was built.
Scale and reach
The tooling produced in this facility is responsible for manufacturing up to one in ten screws made in the United States. As a Tier 2 supplier, JM Die's tooling flows through fastener manufacturers that serve Boeing, Airbus, Tesla, Caterpillar, and the major automotive OEMs. The company works with virtually every fastener house in the domestic market.
Capabilities
JM Die operates Okuma CNC lathes running production across shifts, machining cylindrical parts from tool steel to tolerances measured in ten-thousandths of an inch using Okuma OSP controls. Core competencies include OD/ID turning, threading, grooving, and precision finishing for cold-header tooling applications.
The origin of PRISM AI
The operational challenges encountered running JM Die — from blueprint analysis to G-code programming to job tracking — became the basis for PRISM AI, the manufacturing intelligence platform built by Rearden Labs. Every module in PRISM was designed on this production floor.
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