Ontario dealer sheds Cover-All affiliation

Thursday, June 17, 2010

by SUSAN MANN

Former Ontario Cover-All dealer Ben Hogervorst has teamed up with another business to design and manufacture pre-engineered, membrane-covered buildings in the province.

The new company is called Olympia Fabric Structures of Ontario Corp. It’s a joint venture between Hogervorst, who ran the Cover-All dealership in Ontario for 15 years, and Rob Stute of Maitland Welding and Machining in Wingham.

Saskatoon-based Cover-All Building Systems Inc, which manufactured steel-framed, fabric-covered buildings, sought protection from creditors in March after the recession negatively impacted its business and safety concerns emerged about its buildings. Pricewaterhouse Coopers was named as Cover-All’s receiver in April and it was authorized to sell the company’s eligible assets.

In Ontario, “we’re engineering our own line of buildings under the Olympia Fabric Structures identity,” says Hogervorst, noting that 13 of the former 14 Cover-All dealers located throughout Ontario joined Olympia. The Lucknow-based venture was launched May 31.

The new Olympia company will “assume the warranty that Cover-All left behind,” Hogervorst says. “We are committed to serving our customers and we are not leaving them high and dry.”

Hogervorst says the buildings made by Olympia won’t be exactly the same as the ones manufactured by the former Cover-All. The truss depth will be 50 per cent deeper and the truss tubing is 30 per cent heavier. The product will be quite a bit stronger than the former Cover-All ones, he says.

The changes were made because Olympia officials felt “customers needed to see us come out with something different,” Hogervorst says.

The buildings Olympia will offer are from 30 feet to 140 feet wide (and every 10-foot increment in between) and any length. They’ll be available in the agricultural, industrial and commercial markets. “Generally speaking we’re about 70 per cent farm and 30 per cent commercial,” he says.

If customers want to build an addition to an existing Cover-All building, Olympia can do the extension and it will match up.

Olympia is not associated with the former Saskatoon-based Cover-All Building Systems business that was bought by Norseman Group Ltd. this spring. That deal was approved by the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta on June 11.

Norseman is creating a new company called Norseman Structures Inc. which will resume operations in the former Cover-All plant in Saskatoon in the next few weeks says a company-issued press release. Cover-All had stopped production in March.

Norseman Group Ltd. vice president Mark Mascotto couldn’t be reached for comment.

The new company’s objective is to continue supplying the largest network of fabric membrane building dealers in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. BF