NORTHFIELD — From infrastructure supporting the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Station to nuclear material filters and machinery pieces for a variety of high-tech industries, Tri-State Precision has done a little bit of everything as it marks its 60th anniversary.

The long-running machine shop has been run and owned by the Bordner family since Frank Bordner founded the company in 1965. From there, the family business has grown from a small office made from a dismantled chicken coop to a nearly 7,800-square-foot workshop filled with tools, machines and components.

Twenty-two years after the business was officially incorporated, Brian Bordner took the reins. Now, with Brian scaling back his work hours — but still far from retirement — he and his family are exploring options to pass Tri-State Precision on to the next generation.

“I owned it ever since and now the next transition is to put it in the hands of my son,” said Brian Bordner, 69. “We’re trying to figure out how to do it.”

Since Brian Bordner took over the family business in 1987, his staffing levels have slowly decreased as he realized he could do more with fewer people. At its peak, Tri-State Precision had 12 employees working alongside him in what Bordner called a “training ground” sort of environment for machinists. The business has also grown in the manufacturing sense, with the workshop now hosting 10 computer numerical control (CNC) machines, conventional machinery and a precision grinding room.

In the decades since, though, the business has turned into a true family affair, with his sons Danny and Kevan joining the shop. Currently, it is just Brian and Kevan Bordner working at the shop, and the elder Bordner said he is proud of what he’s done. Brenda Bordner, Brian’s wife, handles the business and financial operations.

“There’s been a lot of improvement since 1995,” Brian Bordner said. “I come in here and I’m just amazed at what I’ve accomplished.”

That sense of pride has been a theme since the very beginning, too, as his father shared a similar sense of satisfaction when he founded the workshop and business.

“I’ve always had the life ambition to have a place of my own,” Frank Bordner told the Greenfield Recorder in 1968. “My main key to success is [being] honest and building a good reputation in reliability.”

While technology has changed and new machines have been installed in the years since Brian Bordner first began working at Tri-State Precision in his teenage years, he said it’s the experiences outside the workshop that have changed the most.

“The people I do business with have changed. … You had personal relationships with people. There was no real internet at that point in the ’90s,” he explained. “Business is so impersonal now and it’s so cold. It’s very hard to build relationships.”

As Tri-State Precision continues its long legacy, Brian Bordner said he’s been slowing down his own work — but he certainly isn’t done yet — and he’s looking toward the future of his family’s business.

Tri-State Precision’s website can be found at tri-state.com, and the company can be reached at 413-498-2961 or brian@tri-state.com.

Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com.