About 70 percent of Christensen Fiberglass Tooling's (CFT) business was making tooling for the marine industry four years ago, and the company filled its last boat order in November last year. Employee numbers plummeted from 32 to nine, but the firm stayed afloat because in 2005 company leaders had begun to diversify into the RV industry and to create composite structures for industrial and architectural applications.
Bill Christensen, owner of the Holland-based company, saw the company's future lay in becoming one of about eight plants in the U.S. to create tooling for gigantic parts. In 2007, CFT invested over $2 million in equipment, including a 44,000-pound Auto-Motion Titan SX60 5-Axis Gantry Mill, and in the training required for Christensen's son, Jeff, to program and operate it.
The mill's capacity to create masters for enormous components launched CFT into the aerospace industry and the military market – the market Bill Christensen calls "the elitest of the elite."
"Our market is for big parts, low volume," he says. "If the military wants a cockpit mold, we machine them a cockpit exactly the shape that they want with the materials we have in-house, ship it to them and they cast a master mold out of it. We've done wings 45 feet long and 14 feet wide at the widest point, and maintained accuracy of 30-thousandths of an inch tolerance from one end to the other; that's about the thickness of three sheets of paper.
One exciting outcome of having the Titan mill was CFT's selection as the creator of the masters for the shell of MIT's 2009 Solar Electric Vehicle, Eleanor.
"A couple of wind turbine manufacturers scheduled a couple of visits here," Christensen says. "It's a matter of getting them in so they can see that we can build what we say we can build."
Source: Bill Christensen, Christensen Fiberglass Tooling; Randy Vant Hul, Balanced Enterprise Solutions, LLC
Deborah Johnson Wood is development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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