Showing Its Mettle : Company Forges Niche Creating Materials Technology
Fatigue Technology Inc. is the house that cold expansion built.
That surprises many people who see the Fatigue Technology sign at 100 Andover Park West, just east of Southcenter shopping mall.
“One woman came in and said, ‘My husband is having trouble sleeping; is there anything you can do for him?’ ” said Len Reid, FTI’s vice president of engineering. “We had to explain to her we deal with metal fatigue, not mental fatigue.”
Reid, an aeronautical engineer who came to the Tukwila company after 25 years in the Australian Air Force, explained that metal fatigue is the process by which metal that is subjected to repeated flexing or bending starts to develop small cracks that grow as the flexing continues.
Anyone who has destroyed an outdated credit card by repeatedly folding it in half until it breaks knows how fatigue works. But FTI has a more sophisticated view.
Boeing came to FTI with a problem 30 years ago when the company was called Industrial Wire and Metal Forming and made wire display racks for magazines and other retail items.
It had been known from the early days of making metal airplanes that tiny fatigue cracks often developed at rivet holes in an airplane’s skin or structural parts.
The aerospace giant had found that fatigue could be greatly reduced if the rivet hole was drilled undersized, then enlarged to the correct size--not by reaming the hole larger, but with a mandrel (a metal rod) that forced the rivet hole open, compressing the metal around the hole.
But Boeing couldn’t find an efficient way to remove the mandrel without permanently deforming the expanded hole.
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Claire Harter, then owner of Industrial Wire, developed a split sleeve, a metal jacket that surrounded the mandrel while the hole was expanded, then took the deformation caused by removing the mandrel. Since the sleeve was split, it was easily removed from the hole and discarded after the mandrel was removed.
“Burke Gibson [Fatigue Technology’s present owner and president] could see a real future” for the technique, Reid said. Industrial Wire had a patent on the manufacturing process used to make the split sleeve. Boeing, though it held a patent on cold expansion, licensed the technology to the Tukwila company.
“For many years, we paid a royalty to Boeing for every sleeve we sold, every hole we processed,” Reid said. Until the Boeing patent expired, “we were Boeing’s biggest royalty payer.”
The company took its present name in 1980, and by the time Reid joined 10 years ago, it was manufacturing the hydraulic tools that pulled the mandrels, finding other uses for the technology, and in the process, writing the book on fatigue.
Indeed, Reid said, Fatigue Technology engineers have published 2,000 technical documents on the subject.
FTI adapted the technique to other materials like the composites being used more and more in aircraft. It adapted the technology to holes of all sizes, from 0.070 inch (70 thousandths of an inch) to 4 1/2 inches in diameter, then to holes that aren’t even round. It found uses for the process in shipbuilding, railroading and medicine.
FTI now has 85 employees locally, including 12 staff engineers, though Reid explained most of FTI’s sales representatives also are engineers “because what we sell is technology.”
The company has offices in Dallas, Atlanta, New York, the United Kingdom and France in addition to its Tukwila headquarters.
Its sales reps not only sell the equipment, but offer classes to train customers’ workers in how to operate it.
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On the floor of the company’s manufacturing facility, workers operate the latest computer numeric control machining tools, making the split sleeves and mandrels in hundreds of sizes, parts for the hydraulic tools that pull the mandrels, and custom adaptations of the tools.
“In some places on the 777, Boeing needed a tool that would push the mandrel rather than pull it,” Reid said, pointing out a plastic-foam mock-up of a large C-shaped forging that had to be designed to adapt a standard FTI puller to the tight spaces Boeing had to work in.
FTI has designed and built robotic units where the split sleeves are fed from a circular magazine to the end of an automated puller.
The manufacturing facility isn’t high-output: FTI makes 50 to 100 puller units a year and an “average run is three or four units,” vice president Bruce Gibson said.
A materials testing lab the company started, essentially to test its own products, now does testing on a contract basis for any company with a knotty new fatigue problem.
It can test materials for fatigue at any temperature from 1,000 degrees down to minus 320 degrees, the temperature of liquid nitrogen used as the chilling agent. An FTI-designed digital traveling microscope allows company researchers to precisely measure the length and depth of fatigue cracks.
“We’ve been asked to test materials you’ve probably never heard of, and some I can’t tell you about,” Reid said.
