Northwest Aerospace News April | May Issue No.14 | Page 67

PACIFIC NORTHWEST AEROSPACE ALLIANCE SPOTLIGHT
W
e’re going to get more into the LM side of things later in
the article, but I’ll leave you with this teaser for now … it per-
forms comparable to Invar, but far more inexpensive and can be
formed in a fraction of the time — offering time and material cost
savings. So why haven’t you heard of these guys yet? For that we
need to go back in time, so everyone hop into your DeLoreans, set
the destination for 2005, and let’s accelerate to 88 mph shall we?
Where did Technical Tooling come from?
Okay we’re here in 2005 and we need to look for a gentleman
named Bob Read. Bob is about to found Technical Tooling as a
mold and pattern shop. He will operate the company as such for
about seven years, before inventing a proprietary material that is
the base for Technical Tooling’s products today.
Fast forward to 2017; Jake is introduced to Bob and his pro-
prietary material by Zach Horn, and both men immediately see
something amazing in Bob’s product and determine that it needs
to be brought to market commercially. The pair purchased the
company from Bob (who still comes to work regularly but doesn’t
deal with any of the business end of things anymore) and set to
work getting the company on a growth trajectory with their sights
set on the aerospace market. But why aerospace?
Well … we’re in the Pacific Northwest, where there is a ton of
aerospace manufacturing, so it’s an obvious application. But ad-
ditionally, all the members of the Technical Tooling crew have a
passion for, or fascination with, aerospace and aviation. Who are
these guys? First Jake Matthaei — a former banker and “finance
guy” with a lot of sales experience through which he’s met and
worked with a lot of companies, many in the aerospace industry.
As a result, Jake fell in love with the tangible aspect of creating
something valuable out of raw materials, and became infatuated
with this industry that puts these massive metal and composite
beasts into the air. Next we have Zach Horn — a local boy who
grew up in the water ski manufacturing industry, seeing things
being made out of composites, eventually moving into design and
product testing and finally leading to a foray into the aerospace
sector of the composites industry, where he did a lot of design and
development work for the past 20 years. This laid the ground-
work for his pivotal work in the development of the LM material.
Zach went to school for business, engineering and also aviation.
Before 9/11 Zach was a commercial pilot and a flight instructor
and still loves to fly.
Now that we have the origin story somewhat covered, what about
the products?
What is Vacu-Grip?
Let’s start with Vacu-Grip. This product is the porous
form of Technical Tooling’s proprietary material. It feels
a lot like pumice, but it has some really cool abilities. If
you’re familiar with vacuum workholding systems, you’ll
know that they’re often comprised of a solid substrate that
has had channels machined into it. The material that is to
be held in place is set on top of this tool and a vacuum is
drawn to hold the material in place. However, the strength
of the vacuum hold is limited by how much surface area
is actually being held (i.e. how many channels there are in
the substrate). Vacu-Grip is different. This porous material
can hold vacuum across nearly 100 percent of the object’s
surface area and evenly supports the part across this same
area. Even cooler is the fact that this material can be made
to fit any shape of object, a feat that would be far more
cumbersome and wasteful to achieve with traditional
vacuum workholding systems. Cooler still? The fact that
these guys have figured out a way to play with the porosity
of the material to achieve different hold strengths across the
surface of the same object. Try that with traditional vacuum
workholding systems!
APRIL | MAY 2020 ISSUE NO. 14
67