Northwest Aerospace News June | July 2019 Issue No. 9 | Page 24

T
he custom-built facility is bright, modern and clean
with a clear process flow. It is evident in a factory tour that
Jorgenson has a background in industrial engineering and
through the set-up of this plant, he hasn’t missed a beat.
There are nine forming presses and the composite materials
use high-performance engineered thermoplastic polymers
which are processed at up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit. They
use a variety of composite materials with continuous carbon
and glass fiber reinforcement in fabric or unidirectional tape
form.
“Unidirectional tapes make for stiffer and stronger materials
which can be tailored to the loads on the parts,” said Leach.
The parts made for Boeing include brackets, angles, beams,
channels, stiffeners and ribs. They do this through the fol-
lowing processes: stamp forming, press molding and contin-
uous compression molding (CCM) of flat laminates, and
profiles. The advantage of the products, according to their
website, is, “A major advantage of thermoplastics is the
rapid processing. The polymer is simply heated, formed to
shape and cooled with no chemical reaction or cure. Aero-
space applications demand the highest performance, a wide
service temperature range, environmental resistance and
very low flammability. The select polymers have desirable
characteristics for aerospace structures and interiors. All the
polymers have high service temperatures, represented by
the glass transition temperature (Tg).”
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NORTHWEST AEROSPACE NEWS
“I had a God-given talent to look
at material and to figure out how to
build parts out of it,” said Jorgenson.
He added, “I had some pretty good
‘Imagineering’ ability. Someone
once asked me, ‘How do you make
so many good parts?’ — the answer
is I made a lot of bad parts first.”
He said that’s how you learn what
a material can
do — through
testing it
and making
more parts.
DAN JORGENSON
ATC Manufacturing Founder/CEO