Ed Steward, Co-Founder of American Kuhne, Inc.,

Dies at 61

(American Kuhne, Inc., Ashaway, RI, April, 2011)… It is with great sadness that American Kuhne announces that Ed Steward passed away on Saturday, April 9^th from an unexpected heart attack.  As the co-founder and Vice President of Process Technology, Ed’s technical contributions as well as his friendship and sense of humor will be greatly missed at American Kuhne.  

In January, 1997 Ed co-founded American Kuhne with his good friend and colleague, Bill Kramer along with Peter Kuhne, President of Kuhne GmbH in St. Augustine, Germany. Prior to that he was employed at the Davis Standard Corporation for 24 years as the Chief Process Engineer.  His responsibilities included screw design and application engineering along with processing related tasks that insured extrusion systems would meet the designated performance goals.

Ed had been a member of the Society of Plastics Engineers since 1973 and was recognized as a Fellow Of The Society in May 2006.  Ed also received the Bruce Maddock Award from the Society of Plastics Engineers Extrusion Division in recognition of his contributions to single screw extrusion in May 2004.

Ed’s educational experience included a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical engineering from the University of Connecticut.  Ed has written numerous papers for various extrusion societies and publications on screw design and related topics.  These included general screw performance, data acquisition for screw design, screw wear, co-extrusion articles, vented extrusion and grooved feed extrusion.

Ed was a devoted husband to his wife Rita, deeply involved in his church, an accomplished golfer and tennis player, as well as an overall sports enthusiast.  In addition to his high performance Steward Barrier Screws, he was well known for his gentle demeanor and outstanding sense of humor.

Services will be held at the Old Mystic Baptist Church, 151 Shewville Road, Mystic, CT  06355, on April 30, 2011 at 1:00 PM.   In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations in his memory be directed to the Old Mystic Baptist Church, P.O. Box 125, Old Mystic, CT 06372.

He will be greatly missed by his family, friends, colleagues, and customers.