Irvine Defense Company Speeding Along

IRVINE —  John Terranova grins at the big blue box like a new father showing off his baby--and, in a way, that’s what the president of Tolo Inc. is doing.

The Irvine defense company is unveiling a unique, ultra-high-speed manufacturing system today that can cut production time on some complex metal parts by 90%.

The self-contained system can spit out in an hour a complex machined aluminum aircraft part that yesterday took nine separate operations and 14 hours to produce.

“It’s the future of our industry,” says a beaming Terranova.

At least, it’s the future for Tolo, a 270-employee company that stuck to its core business during the worst of the defense industry depression in the 1980s and early ‘90s.

While other defense companies were closing their doors or shifting to commercial products, Tolo chose to fight shrinking defense budgets with new technologies that allowed it to slash production costs and improve the quality of finished products.

“Aerospace used to be purely technology-oriented. Every year was a new plane or missile,” industry consultant John Kutter said.

“But the budget realities of the post Cold War era mean cost is now the important factor. To the extent we are able to use technology like high-speed manufacturing, we can keep jobs and businesses that otherwise would be heading offshore,” said Kutter, president of Quarterdeck Investment Partners Inc.

Terranova says that Tolo, which had $24 million in sales last year, expects to hit $90 million in 2000. About two-thirds of it, he says, will come from a technology called Grid-Lock that didn’t exist until 1995.

That process involves making complex parts out of just a few interlocking pieces. The finished parts are lighter but stronger than those they replace.

The technology relies heavily on complex and highly accurate machining of the metal pieces, and Tolo’s new machine makes the job dramatically faster.

Tolo has won several major contracts and a number of coveted production excellence citations from clients, like Boeing Co., that have begun using Grid-Lock parts.

A Tolo-designed and manufactured “avionics rack” that holds the navigation equipment enabled the aircraft manufacturer to slash 13 days from the time it takes to make one of the planes--and to cut $58,000 from the price of the part.

Tolo, which has added almost 100 employees in the past two years as it scrambles to keep up with the growing demand for its products, was acquired by BF Goodrich Aerospace three months ago. It was a deal, Terranova says, that guaranteed Tolo its freedom to pursue technological advances while freeing the company of the money worries that plagued it as a small independent manufacturer.

The first big equipment purchase under the new owner, at $1.5 million, is the bright blue, super-fast milling machine, one of four the company plans to buy and install over the next three years.

The milling equipment is based on British machine maker Marwin Production System’s 15-year-old Automax line of high-speed machines but uses advanced technologies to achieve a nearly tenfold performance increase.

It takes the machine just two minutes to carve a thick piece of aluminum into a complex calibration block that Tolo’s other high-speed milling machines take 30 minutes to produce.

Terranova said that Tolo plans to license its Grid-Lock technology to other manufacturers and, with Marwin, market it in conjunction with the ultra high-speed manufacturing system. The first deal was signed last month with an Israeli aerospace firm.

But the 42-year-old company doesn’t intend to drop manufacturing in favor of marketing.

“We are still a product maker,” Terranova said. “That’s what this is all about.”