About

About Salco

Built by two people who believed shops deserved better.

SALCO stands for Scott and Lucy Company.

Before the warehouse, the delivery trucks, and dozens of manufacturers, it was Scott George selling oil out of his garage and Lucy keeping the books at the kitchen table.

Our Story

Scott's first job out of college was selling oil and coolants for Mobil's largest distributor on the West Coast. He learned the products, learned the customers, and learned what actually mattered to the people buying. He spent the next 12 years at Methods Machine Tools, selling screw machines to shops across Southern California. He was inside a different shop every day. He knew the machines, the operators, the purchasing managers. One of his customers came to him looking for a better coolant. That's when he found Swiss Silver. It solved problems other products couldn't, and Salco has been the exclusive West Coast distributor ever since. But Scott kept seeing the same gap everywhere he went: shops had the equipment but not the supply support to keep it running right. In 2001, he and Lucy started Salco to fix that. The first location was their garage. Then a shipping container in Huntington Beach. Lucy handled the finances from the start. She still runs them today. For the first five or six years, Salco was strictly oil and coolants. Then people Scott trusted started telling him he should carry cutting tools. Matt Curry. The team at MC Sales. Fullerton Tool. He looked at his footprint, looked at the margins, and realized he could stock tooling in the same space. Fullerton, MC Sales, and Nachi were the first lines. Everything else grew from there. In 2014, Salco moved into the McFadden Ave warehouse in Santa Ana. That's where we are today. The team is small, and that's the point. When you call Salco, you talk to someone who knows your shop, your machines, and probably what you ordered last month.

What We Do

We carry thousands of precision cutting tools, indexable tooling, and machining supplies from over 80 manufacturers. End mills, drills, inserts, Swiss tools, collets, cutting fluids. If your shop runs it, we probably have it on the shelf in Santa Ana. No phone trees. No offshore queues. No chatbot asking you to describe your problem in 50 words or less. You call, a real person picks up, and they actually know what you're talking about.

Why Salco

Cutting tools affect cycle times, surface finish, tool life, and your bottom line. Sometimes the right answer is spending a little more on a tool that improves your production so much that the price doesn't matter. That's the work Scott actually enjoys. Not moving boxes. Solving problems. It's why he still shows up on Saturdays in a t-shirt and flip flops if that's what it takes. He's driven the truck. Driven the forklift. Done whatever the business needs. That's how Salco runs. And it's why shops stay.

Why Shops Choose Salco

What we stand for, and how we work.

We Keep You Moving

We stock locally, deliver same day, and stay ahead of what you need before it becomes a problem. Downtime costs you money. We get that.

Trust, Not Transactions

We do what we say we're going to do. Every order, every call, every follow up. Partnerships aren't built on promises. They're built on follow through.

We Find It

We pick up the phone, ask the right questions, and get answers fast. If it's not on our shelf, we'll track it down. "Can't find it" isn't in our vocabulary.