Seattle Business Magazine

January 2011

Excerpts from the full article:

By themselves, they don't look like much -- black threads thinner than strands of human hair, almost delicate to the touch. But weave those fine carbon fibers together in a fabric, coat them with a resin to hold them together, and now you have a material with which to build car bodies, airplane fuselages, boat hulls and superstructures, wind-turbine blades, sporting goods and more in the future, possibly the heart of an entire new industry for the state of Washington....

...When Bombardier established a plant in Belfast to build composite wings for a new jet, it brought in waterjet machines to cut the composites from Flow International of Kent, tooling from Sedro-Woolley-based Janicki Industries Inc. and computer-controlled, precision-guided drilling machines from Mukilteo’s Electroimpact Inc....

....Bellingham-based All American Marine and Anacortes-based James Betts Enterprises cooperated in building an ultra-lowwake,hydrofoil-equipped passenger ferry for Kitsap Transit; composite materials were used in the hydrofoil and the passenger cabin to reduce its weight, conventional aluminum construction being much heavier. Janicki Industries provided the tooling for the carbon-fi ber components of the BMW Oracle racing yacht, winner of the 2010 America’s Cup. And when an Ohio company, Zyvex Technologies, decided to launch an unmanned military watercraft using its own nanotube-reinforced carbon material, it built and tested the vessel at its Puget Sound-region facilities....

...Janicki says Washington isn’t currently a global leader in the composites business if the measurement is strictly by pounds of resin or carbon produced or used. To date, the state has almost no presence in the automotive sector, which represents about a third of the worldwide market for carboncomposite materials.

But when it comes to high-performance materials used in airplane parts and components, he adds, “There’s a group of people within this region that’s the best in the world.”...