Clarklake Machine, Inc. was formed by Roy Saari and his two partners in 1966 as Saari Associates and was incorporated in 1973. The original location was on Airline Dr. in Jackson, Michigan

. In 1974 a new building was built at 9325 South Meridian Road and Saari Associates, Inc. moved in, three years later a 1,600 square foot addition was added to the building. In 1978 the property next door at 9451 South Meridian Rd. Clarklake, MI was purchased, and Saari Associates, Inc. moved. Still not big enough, a 2,400 square foot addition was added in 1979.

Henry, Mark, and Mike DeKarske became the proud owners of Saari Associates, Inc. in the summer of 1981. In 1995 Saari Associates, Inc. needed another addition. The building expanded south 5,000 square feet to its present size of 19,200 square feet of manufacturing space and 1,728 of office space. During that addition the old flat roof on the existing building was changed to a pitched roof to stop the leaks forever. The original location was on Airline Dr. in Jackson, MichiganIn 1996 the name was changed to a more fitting name, Clarklake Machine, Inc. In 2000 Henry DeKarske retired leaving Mark and Mike DeKarske as equal partners. The front office area got a complete facelift the summer of 2003.

In late 2008 we had three machines down for the same reason, a broken tool disk and we had just changed one of them two weeks earlier, we had to do something different. Our Tooling Engineer looked at it and came up with the CMI Segmented Tool Disk for the Haas VF series machining center and started selling them on eBay in 2009 and are still selling them today.

In 2012 Mike DeKarske passed away leaving Mark his stocks. With Mark at the helm, we received our AS9100D Certification in early 2019 and needed to replace one of our lathes and he went with a Haas ST-30. In late 2019 Mark found out that he was ill. He knew he wanted to keep the company in the family, so he approached his brothers Matt and Martin (Joe) DeKarske, and they accepted the challenge. On October 6th of 2020 with Mark’s passing Matt and Joe DeKarske became equal partners.

Clarklake Machine, Inc. added two SVM4100 Doosan machining centers both with fourth axis late 2021 replacing some of the older machines.

Not only has the location, building size, name, and ownership changed, but our products have also changed. In the 60s and early 70s our main product was tool and die work with some production as fill in. We had a complete tool room and 6 try out presses. In the mid-70s we received our first production job. We were machining clutch housings on conventional machines. In 1979 we bought our first numerical controlled machining center. Today we are no longer manufacturing dies or have presses. However, what we do have are many up-to-date CNC machines, a Quality Management Department, and an Engineering Department with two seats of SolidWorks and various Cam programs to produce machine programs for the manufacturing of precision parts