Friday, January 09, 2015BOARDMAN, Ohio -- A startup company here is looking to become a major manufacturer of products used in markets that, on their surface, appear to be entirely unrelated.
Triptech 3D, now three months old, has found a way to move into both the energy exploration and additive manufacturing industries, very different markets that nonetheless hold enormous potential and opportunity for the products the company makes, says its CEO, Charles George.
“The need was there,” George says, pointing to a line of plastic welding rod as it’s fed into a spool from the company’s single extrusion press. “Everybody was always clamoring for high-quality filament, which really doesn’t exist out there.”
Triptech uses a plastics-extrusion process to manufacture welding rods used in the oil and gas industry to fasten and secure plastic liners on well pads. The same manufacturing process is used to produce plastic filament that serves as feedstock for 3-D printers, George says.
George, also the CEO of Hapco Inc., a Kent-based company that supplies the oil and gas industry with welding equipment, plastic tarps and small hand-held extruders, observed that Hapco’s customers were largely unhappy about the quality of welding rods in the market. The same applied to Hapco’s other clients that use the company’s extrusion equipment for 3-D printing applications.
“Hapco got involved with Oak Ridge National Labs and supplied 3-D equipment to the extruder head,” George recalls. “When we met with Oak Ridge, they expressed some of the same concerns. One of the biggest problems with the industry right now was getting quality filament.”
The demand led to the creation of Triptech, a company designed to manufacture plastic extrusions that satisfy both markets, George says. The company today leases space at 1209 Velma Court, just off Lake Park Road in Boardman.
“We had some built-in business because we knew people were already looking for it,” he says. The objective was to increase revenues.
George brought in Randy Vegso, a longtime business associate who has 30 years of experience in the extrusion industry, as a partner in the venture. Vegso, among the founders of Vinyl Profiles Inc. in North Jackson, started looking for other opportunities when he left that company in 2011. Among them was exploring 3-D printing prototyping opportunities for manufacturers. That idea switched to manufacturing filament to feed the 3-D printer industry.
A factor that drew the business to producing filament was George’s son, Alex, the lead animator for Quietman Studios in New York City. The company was looking to produce 3-D caricatures for an upcoming awards show, and his son related that they were having a difficult time finding the right filament to supply its 3-D printers.
“The filament side of the business is actually a whole different market,” George says. “It’s a whole different group of users.”
As the 3-D printer market grows – a consumer can purchase a modest desktop 3-D printer for less than $500 – so too will the demand for plastic filament for consumers, George notes. “It’s tougher to penetrate than the normal business-to-business model,” he says. “We also looked at licensing the product to a company that has inroads to colleges and universities, because they’re a big user of the filament product.”
Other potential customers are involved in architecture and building, George says. “I have in my office at Kent a 3-D printed model of what the new Kent State School of Architecture is going to look like.”
There are other potential customers who could be spawned through connections with organizations such as America Makes in Youngstown, the first of President Obama’s advanced manufacturing hubs that are designed to spur research and development in additive manufacturing.
Triptech spent a “couple hundred thousand dollars” on a new extrusion press equipped with laser technology that can detect precise dimensions and tolerances of the plastic line under production, George reports.
On the morning of Dec. 16, Triptech’s press was manufacturing black-colored welding rods that will be inserted into hand-held extrusion guns, devices that resemble hot-glue guns – operated by oil and gas workers who lay down large, plastic well-pad liners. The weld guns heat the wire rod and the melted plastic delivers a strong weld that binds the large segments of liner together.
George notes Triptech is in discussions with two companies that would distribute the product throughout the Middle East and South America.
“We think the opportunities are out there,” George says.
Material is delivered to the company in the form of tiny white plastic pellets manufactured in Cleveland, Vegso says. These pellets vary in their composition because certain products require specific densities.
Pellets are poured into a small hopper at the top end of the line and then fed into the press, where they’re first heated, Vegso demonstrates. Should the order require color, as is the case with this particular run – colored pellets are mixed in with the initial batch and simultaneously fed into the press. The now-fungible plastic is pushed into the press and drawn through a die, creating a spaghetti-like plastic line that moves through a heating and cooling bath.
“What separates us from a lot of people is our laser,” Vegso says, which can precisely gauge the diameter of the line before it is coiled into a spool at the end of the process. One of the most prevalent complaints from the industry – mostly 3-D printing and additive manufacturing – is that the diameters of the filament were skewed.
The small laser monitors the exact diameter of the rod or filament, allowing the operator to correct the problem before the product is manufactured, Vegso adds. The line is automatically wound onto a spool about the size of a large film reel and then packaged and shipped to the customer.
“With a filament, you can run a spool a minute on this line,” George says.
Triptech has just three employees: George, Vegso and a third partner, Jason Wood, owner of Actionable Insights, an electronics marketing firm.
That number is likely to increase over the next 18 months, George projects, as the company has plans to build additional production lines as business in the energy and 3-D markets grow. Its customer base stands to improve as well, buttressed in part through Hapco’s connections in both energy and 3-D printing.
Additive manufacturing provides an especially dynamic market for Triptech, George says, and the Youngstown region is the perfect place to build the business. He cites initiatives underway at the Youngstown Business Incubator, Youngstown State University, America Makes and the University of Akron’s Polymer Institute as engines for future research and growth in the industry.
“People are noticing,” George says. “We travel the country and when we mention ‘Youngstown,’ they say, ‘Oh, you have America Makes.’ It’s not like it used to be.”
Pictured: Triptech 3D partner Randy Vegso and CEO Charles George started the company after seeing the need for high-quality, precision-sized filaments for use in the oil and gas industry as well as in 3-D printing.
Copyright 2015 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
CLICK HERE to subscribe to our free daily email headlines and to our twice-monthly print edition.