Since Ultra-Fab launched the RV market’s first electric jack in 1990, the Elkhart, Indiana, supplier has produced more than one million jacks. Inside Ultra-Fab’s 37,000 square-foot facility, 95 percent of products are geared toward the aftermarket, much of which is dedicated to RVs.
After Vernon Searer founded Elkhart Rivet & Register, his son Craig started making floor registers in the basement in 1958. The company soon became a small metal fabrication shop, run by Craig Searer and his brother, Darryl Searer. Though he later returned as chairman, Darryl Searer left the family company in 1990 to join Dometic Corp., whose subsidiary A&E later sold its power jack and hoist lines to Elkhart River & Register.
When Elkhart Rivet & Register started making its own products and selling to distributors, rather than other suppliers, the brothers changed the company name to Ultra-Fab, the best in fabricated products. Today, they make tongues, tripods and wheel chocks on top of other RV accessories.
As other companies joined in on making electric jacks, Ultra-Fab set themselves apart by finding ways to differentiate their product. The company started using its test stand more to improve products by extending their fatigue life. The test stand benchmarks electric tongue jacks by continually extending and contracting them until they break. Ultra-Fab also developed and patented a feature that raised jacks so a gun could apply grease onto the jack’s middle tube. These improvements increased Ultra-Fab jacks’ cycles from 700 to 2,000 uses.
In 2014, Ultra-Fab expanded on its Ultra brand, which relies on an acme screw drive, with its ball screw Phoenix line. The ball screw allows jacks to go faster and is programmed to remember hitch heights. Ultra-Fab markets Phoenix as “the fastest jack on earth” and is the only manufacturer with a 10-year warranty on an electric tongue jack.
