Northwest Aerospace News October | November Issue No. 5 | Page 43

I
f you were to fly on commercial air-
craft, there is a great chance you have
seen some of the parts that General
Plastics has made.
The company is finding uses for this
technique in non-aerospace industries,
he added. “Light-weighting is obvious-
ly very big in the automotive industry
now for fuel savings.”
Then there’s the use of lighter-weight
foam in tooling and prototyping.
When you’re doing a proof of concept,
Johnson said, it’s far easier and cheap-
er to carve a block of polyurethane
foam into the shape you need than to
machine aluminum or expensive alloys
“It helps facilitate R&D faster,” he
said. “If you make them from foam,
you can really rip through it fast. And
if you’re only needing two or three
parts it really makes sense.”
“And for tooling, it’s easier to use
foam to create the complex mandrels
used to lay up modern composite
components,” Johnson said. “You can
make very complex shapes and make
them very quickly.”
The use of high-temperature foam
in tooling is another one of the big
growth opportunities for the company,
Johnson said.
“There’s a critical need for foam-based
tooling,” he said. “Think of the deep
draw tooling that will need to be used
to accommodate the designs used in
many of the prototype airplanes.”
To serve that, the company has devel-
oped what it calls LAST-A-FOAM®,
polyurethane foam that can withstand
temperatures up to 400 degrees Fahr-
enheit in conditions like those inside
an autoclave – and up to 480 degrees
Fahrenheit in other situations.
To serve all these markets, General
Plastics runs what are essentially two
businesses under one roof. One part of
the company takes raw materials and
makes them into polyurethane foam
sheets and blocks that customers use
to create their own products; the other
takes those materials and incorporates
them into build-to-print products for
other clients.
OCTOBER | NOVEMBER 2018 ISSUE NO. 5
43