In the world of Big Oil, the little King Oil Co. manufacturing plant west of Hagerstown is a drop in the bucket, but companies as large as Rubbermaid have depended on King’s mechanical lubricating products for several years.

“Most of our competitors are a who’s who of some of the largest companies — Mobil, Exxon and Shell and Texaco,” said Matthew J. Pesin, who co-owns King Oil with his wife, Susan.

“And we have terrific (base oil) suppliers, every one of whom dwarfs us. But they’re not thumbing their nose at a sort of quirky little company that’s like a grease stain in their driveway,” Matthew Pesin said.

“Quirky” and “little” well describe King Oil, which was founded in the early 1980s by Mennonite businessman John D. King, who sold the business to the Pesins five years ago.

With five full-time and one part-time employee, King Oil manufactures more than 400 lubricating products for industrial, agricultural, machine tool and automotive needs. In all, it sells about 75,000 gallons of finished lubricating oil a year, Matthew Pesin said.

All this is done with exacting formula-specific precision using a combination of old tanks, pipes, home-built machinery and testing equipment in a long metal building across a farm field from U.S. 40. The business is along Huyett Lane, a rural road that ties into U.S. 40 east of Huyetts Crossroads.

Despite its quiet, old-fashioned setting, King Oil has built its products into a wide cross-section of modern-day applications.

The products are distributed by wholesalers in at least 25 states and in some foreign countries. Its customer list in this area alone includes many companies, big and small.

“If you just took the Tri-State area, you’d be hard-pressed to find a manufacturing concern or auto-related enterprise that did not have some product of ours in their pantry, so to speak,” Pesin said. “It might only be a 5-gallon pail. We also have customers that buy thousands of gallons of products from us on an annual basis.”

John King, who died in February at age 60, had a business called John King Sales Co. in 1981, when he also began selling another company’s oil products, according to Susan Pesin, who has researched the history.

Back then, she said, King sold the oil products, as well as saw blades for cutting and grinding applications in the construction industry, out of the trunk of his car as he traveled the area.

King Oil Co. was founded in 1982, when King began formulating and selling his own oils in Maugansville, Susan Pesin said. After some years, King moved his company to a barn his family owned on the acreage off U.S. 40 where the current facility is located, she said.

After the barn was destroyed by fire in 1990, she said, King erected much of the current plant a couple of hundred yards away. He already was planning to expand it when the Pesins bought the business in 2008.

In some ways, the Pesins were a world apart from King.

“With Susan and I coming from southern and central California, we couldn’t have been closer than 180 degrees culturally opposite,” Matthew Pesin said.

Having grown up in Manhattan, Matthew Pesin “was reared in a not-too-observant Jewish family,” Susan Pesin said. His father was an executive in various toiletry companies over the years, and his mother was vice president of advertising at Avon, the beauty products company, she said.

Susan said she was raised as an “all-around, no-particular-affiliation Christian” in Los Angeles. With her parents working in the food industry, she said, “the only thing I knew about oil, prior to coming here, was Crisco.”

As a young man, Matthew Pesin said, he moved to California and got a job with Atlantic Richfield Co., an oil company now more commonly known as ARCO. Pesin worked on drilling rigs in ARCO’s oil fields in the 1980s.

Then, for ARCO, and later, for BP, after it acquired ARCO, Pesin drove a gasoline delivery tanker truck in and out of a refinery that processed millions of gallons of fuel a day.

Next, he worked for BP in an office as a midlevel manager.

“I was going from rowdy Teamster to managing 100 rowdy Teamsters,” he said with a laugh.

In 2007, Pesin said, he heard about an unexpected opportunity. The news came from his father, who by then had become the head of a company making brake cleaners and other automotive aerosol maintenance products in Florida.

The senior Pesin’s company had learned that King Oil Co. was for sale and considered buying it, but backed away, deciding that the Maryland firm was “a little too small” for the Florida company’s goals, Matthew Pesin said.

So, he said, his father urged him to buy King Oil.

“My father had developed an admiration” for John King and felt the company was “a winner — an underperforming, but very unique company,” Matthew Pesin said. “I think my father sort of realized I was sort of burned out” working in corporate America.

Had Pesin always wanted to buy an oil company?

“I didn’t know I did until the opportunity presented itself,” Pesin said. “I figured if I could pull it off, it would be an excellent opportunity.”

So in November 2008, after 22 years of working for major oil companies, Pesin, then 45, and his wife, then 57, bought King Oil. Its founder agreed to stay on for two years to teach the new owners all about his business.

The timing of the purchase — in the middle of the nation’s recession — “was a little dicey,” Matthew Pesin said.

The new owners took to King.

“He was an interesting guy,” Matthew Pesin said. Clearly well-educated, “he was like a cross between a minister and a ... scientist,” Pesin said.

From the start, with so much to learn, he said, the Pesins had to “hit the ground running.”

What they learned, Pesin said, is that the process King had created is well thought-out, but “probably looks a little more complicated than it really is. It’s like an oversized kitchen, except we’re not making anything edible.”

The first thing you might see upon pulling up alongside King Oil’s 12314 Huyett Lane operation are several gray metal tanks positioned next to a long beige building.

Each of the tanks, up to 20 feet tall, holds thousands of gallons of oil, brought in by tanker trucks and, originally, from oil drilling sites as far away as the Gulf of Mexico and the Middle East.

Pipes carry the oil into the manufacturing part of the building that, as King had planned, was expanded in 2009.

“Basically, we do nearly everything by hand. About a third of our facility is devoted to formulation and blending,” Pesin said.

Inside, the oil can be pumped into either of two large blending tanks. Each contains heating coils as well as a stout stirring shaft with a propeller at the bottom and metal paddles up its length.

In addition to the oil, the company stocks as many as 50 additives — chemicals that can give the oil base “anti-wear properties, extreme pressure properties, viscosity improvement properties,” Matthew Pesin said.

“The way the lubricants are created is that they all start with base oil — either a petroleum or a synthetic oil,” he said. “It’s how they are additized that creates the unique properties that enable a lubricant to be assigned to an application, whether it be engine oils, transmission oils, drive-train lubricants, hydraulic oils, (or) machine tool lubricants and coolants.”

Each King Oil product contains at least one additive. “In some of the more sophisticated formulas,” products contain as many as 12 additives, Pesin said.

Each additive is kept in 55-gallon drums. By itself, each steel barrel is heavy, but the additives add about 7.5 pounds per gallon. With 55 gallons, that’s more than 400 pounds, he said.

So how are additives poured into the mixing tank, without dumping in too much?

The answer begins with what Pesin calls a “barrel-tipper,” a modified forklift that holds a drum upright and is equipped with a sort of blade, an extra motor and a digital weight gauge.

“This barrel-tipper was another John King creation. There are commercially manufactured ones, but this one is definitely homemade,” Pesin said.

In using the taller tank, which can hold up to 900 gallons of blended lubricants, a machine operator drives the barrel-tipper to the tank, raises the drum the full 124 inches of the tank’s height and tips the drum so it slowly spills its contents onto the oil inside — while workers watch the digital weight gauge and watch the fluid rise in a transparent vinyl hose that runs up the side of the tank like a height gauge.

The exercise is a mechanical ballet, defined by volume and temperature, that seems to work with uncanny precision. The temperature of the oil is critical because it must be heated to 120 to 150 degrees Fahrenheit for the best mixing conditions, but heat expands its volume, Pesin said.

Complicating the matter is that some additives are so thick that they also must be heated to a proper mixing temperature. One particular additive, he said, is “very stubborn, probably has the viscosity of, like, brontosaurus snot.”

King’s formulas are based on weight, but figuring the weights is tricky when dealing with the tall blending tank because it’s too large to have its own weighing scale, he said. So by measuring volume and temperature, the weight of the base oil and of each additive can be determined from outside the tank, he said.

The smaller blending tank does have its own weighing scale, so the weight can be measured directly as each additive is poured in. But that tank holds only 300 gallons.

In general, he said, the mixing process for each product takes an hour or two.

Point A to Point B

King Oil products are packaged and sold in quantities as small as 4 ounces, in a plastic bottle, and as large as 55 gallons, in a metal drum. Sometimes, orders are so large that the product is delivered in bulk by tanker truck.

Before any product is packaged, a sample is taken from every newly mixed batch, bottled, labeled and carefully tested, Pesin said.

“We want to make sure that the content of each product is consistent with its labeling,” he said.

The testing is done in a room not much larger than a small clothes closet that’s next to the manufacturing area.

Inside, Pesin sits in front of a clear-sided, 5-gallon vat containing a light synthetic oil that’s held at a constant temperature.

“The thermometers we use are very accurate, and the heating element inside the vat can adjust hundreds of times a minute,” he said.

Using the same type of small rubber aspirator that a parent would use to clear an infant’s nostrils, he sucks a small amount of a newly mixed lubricant from its sample bottle and squirts it into a U-shaped test tube — certified for this purpose — that hangs inside the vat.

Then, he starts a digital timer, watching carefully as the lubricant falls very slowly from one mark to another mark on the tube.

The “Point A to Point B” movement can take several minutes. When it’s complete, Pesin uses the time measurement in an equation that he checks against charts on a wall to verify the viscosity of each sample.

All this is done “prior to packaging in case we do have to correct something,” he said. “Mistakes are very few and far between, but they can happen.”

King Oil aims for products that more than meet industry standards, Pesin said.

“The quality of the additives and that (of the oil base) exceed the manufacturer specifications” for each machine’s lubricant requirements, he said.

“Our products are considered premium,” he said.

John King’s original formulas for making them are contained in a loose-leaf binder notebook that — unlike those for, say, Coca-Cola — aren’t kept under guard.

Pesin jokes that anyone is welcome to look at them. It’s understanding what each means that would be the challenge, he said.

And though King Oil products are sold at many industrial distributorships, they’re not available at any “mainstream retail” locations, Pesin said.

But area residents can buy such King products as bar oil for chain saws, plus a host of oil spouts and other oil-related products at the company’s small retail shop. It’s not hard to find, sandwiched between the plant’s small lab and its much larger warehouse space.