Gregory Seay
Updated: July 22, 2019
Manufacturing
Whitcraft retools, rebrands its advanced manufacturing assets
HBJ File Photo
Whitcraft Group is headquartered in Eastford.
By Gregory Seay
For the second time this year, Eastford precision-aeroparts maker The Whitcraft Group has gone outside Connecticut to acquire technology to enhance its own.
In May, Whitcraft quietly bought for an undisclosed sum advanced-manufacturing operations in Scarborough, Maine, and Tempe, Ariz., from LAI International. Their technologies include laser cutting, electrical discharge machining and precision machining.
That deal followed Whitcraft’s February announcement of the purchase, also for an undisclosed sum, of Form 3D Solutions, of Dover, N.H.
Since then, Whitcraft CEO Doug Folsom said his company has been assimilating Form 3D’s expertise in additive-manufacturing technology used to form three-dimensional, precision titanium and nickel-alloy parts.
Doug Folsom, CEO, The Whitcraft Group
Folsom said recently both transactions mesh with the closely held company’s dual-pronged strategy for growth: acquisitions and organic.
That both outfits complement one another, he said, is an added bonus as the global manufacturing sector continues its slow but steady embrace of three-dimensional metal-printing to precisely fashion parts for jet engines, fuselages, wings and other aerospace-related components.
Metal-printing technology, known, too, as additive manufacturing, helps Whitcraft and other producers manage their shrinking corps of skilled toolmakers, many of whom are in or headed to retirement, Folsom said. Meantime, apprentice toolmakers in Connecticut and other states aren’t being trained fast enough to replace them.
East Hartford jet-engine builder Pratt & Whitney and General Electric/Safran jet-engine partnership, and their supplier base, are Whitcraft’s primary aerospace customers.
“That’s our market,’’ Folsom said. “Ninety-five percent of what we make goes into aircraft engines.’’
Looking ahead, Folsom pointed to signs that the airline industry’s torrid appetite for jet engines is flattening, meaning a more normal production-delivery timetable for commercial engines.
U.S. airframe maker Boeing Co.’s ongoing efforts to resolve a flight-software glitch tied to its grounded 737-MAX fleet have not directly impacted Whitcraft’s operations, he said.
Still, the large numbers of Pratt geared turbofan engines powering the global fleet of single-aisle jetliners means potentially years of backlog orders for Whitcraft and other suppliers of spare and replacement engine parts.
Currently, Whitcraft, which doesn’t publicly post financials, has an order backlog “equal to two years of revenue,’’ Folsom said.
Whitcraft, which in 2015 landed in the hands of its third private-equity owner, New York’s Greenbriar Equity Group LLC, whose deep pockets helped fund Whitcraft’s recent buys, is open to more acquisitions that will improve efficiency, but has nothing in the works now.
Meantime, Folsom said the company is taking time — and money — to rebrand Whitcraft’s subsidiary units. Its Connecticut Tool & Manufacturing in Plainville is now Whitcraft Plainville. The rest are: Whitcraft Eastford; Whitcraft Southington; Whitcraft Newburyport (Mass.); Whitcraft Scarborough; and Whitcraft Tempe.
“We were finding we have too many brands out there,’’ Folsom said.
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