A fire earlier this month at the Michigan plant of a Ford Motor Co. parts supplier has forced the Kentucky Transpark’s biggest employer to hit the brakes on production for at least a week.

Bowling Green Metalforming, the first company to land in the transpark in northern Warren County in 2004 and now the industrial park’s largest employer with about 1,700 workers, halted production Thursday. Sources with knowledge of the plant said its workers have not been told exactly when production will resume.

“We’re in the middle of a plant shutdown caused by supplier issues,” Bowling Green Metalforming Plant Manager Keith Gameson said Monday.

Gameson didn’t offer any details about when the plant, which makes vehicle body and chassis assemblies for General Motors and Ford, would resume production.

The shutdown stems from a May 2 fire at the Meridian Magnesium Products plant in Eaton Rapids, Mich., that has caused Ford to shut down its F-150 and Super Duty truck assembly lines in Dearborn, Mich., Kansas City and Louisville.

Meridian Magnesium makes a part called a front bolster that adds structural support to the front of the engine compartment. The fire damaged the part of the plant where the front bolsters are made, and the plant has run out of inventory.

A spokesman for Meridian Magnesium, Benjamin Wu, said the plant should resume production by June 1. The company has extra sets of the dies used to make the front bolsters, and those dies could be used at another production facility, Wu said.

Meanwhile, Kelli Felker, Ford’s manufacturing and labor communications manager, said F-150 production could resume as soon as Friday.

What that means for Bowling Green Metalforming is not known, although employees have been told they may return to work as soon as Thursday.

The idling of the Bowling Green Metalforming plant comes at an inopportune time for its parent company, Magna International of Ontario, Canada.

Like its Bowling Green plant, Magna has been growing rapidly. The company, which operates in 29 countries and has about 168,000 employees, reported record sales of $10.8 billion for the first quarter of 2018. Its first-quarter earnings per share of $1.83 was up by 21 percent over the same quarter last year.

Likewise, Bowling Green Metalforming has been the main engine driving the growth of the transpark. The plant has expanded five times since the 2004 opening, and its employment has doubled since 2014.

Bowling Green Metalforming, which now occupies a 950,000-square-foot plant on 132 acres, received the John B. Holland Business of the Year Award from the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce last fall.