Continuous Composites anything but child's play
Continuous Composites CEO Tyler Alvarado.
The Continuous Composites team at their Lakeside Avenue offices in Coeur d’Alene. (Photo courtesy Allie Simon)
Photo courtesy Allie Simon The equipment used at Continuous Composites is meant for more heavy-duty industrial printing than traditional desktop 3D printers, CEO Tyler Alvarado said.
Tyler Alvarado had only a few minutes in a cramped schedule. Between meetings and trade show appearances in Los Angeles, the up-and-coming CEO needs every spare second of his day to grow what he and many others believe is the future of manufacturing.
“I think I have a couple minutes for you,” he allowed from Los Angeles. “Sure.”
Alvarado is often maximizing his resources, whether with his schedule or with his company’s ventures. Continuous Composites, a six-year-old industrial manufacturer headquartered in Coeur d’Alene, is in the business of creating incredibly lightweight, incredibly sturdy custom parts through industrial-grade 3D printing.
“Right now, we’re focused on industrial education,” he said. “There’s room for a desktop version with a consumer price point; the market is leaning that way and has been for some time. But the contracts we carry are for much larger industrial products.”
Alvarado couldn’t say much about the nature of those contracts, and rightfully so. Continuous Composites is working under contract with Lockheed-Martin, the United States Air Force and the United States Navy. Working through the Department of Defense, the small company is producing durable, fractionally light parts for troops at home and abroad.
“These things we’re making,” he spilled, “these are industrial grade parts. They’re not toys. They’re not trinkets. It’s not child’s play what we’re doing.”
Continuous Composites was chosen by the DOD in part because of the capability of the company’s equipment, but moreso because of the quality of their builds. Unlike commercially-sold 3D printers, the local company uses a towering crane-like machine to weave the work of thousands of threads through a delicate pattern into a practically-indestructable material.
“Think of it like a spool of yarn,” he explained. “There’s 3,000 individual fillaments, bound together with a proprietary resin. The strength comes from the fiber, and the resin is essentially what binds the fiber together.”
That finished product is then fed into the digital blueprints of the desired result, where the printer goes to work molding and shaping the soon-to-be. The finished product, Alvarado said, comes in stronger than aluminum or steel, but at a fraction of the price. He said the secret in the secret recipe is the resin.
“Arkema is a manufacturer of the resin we’re working with,” he said. “That bond they provide gives us a carbon fiber far superior to anything else out there.”
Continuous Composites is more than just working with Arkema. The Coeur d’Alene manufacturer signed into a strategic partnership in September to use the European company’s curable materials.
“It’s a joint development agreement,” Alvarado said. “What that means is, they’re making a financial and personal investment in our resin process, mainly by engaging us right now and in collaboration with our customers. They will commercialize it, both of us will sell it, and they’ll work on all the [research and development]. It’s a big vote of confidence in our technology. I mean, this is a company that did more than eight billion dollars in sales last year.”
$8.8 billion, actually, which has the entire company ecstatic.
“What’s really exciting to us,” Allie Simon, marketing manager for Continuous Composites, said from her Lakeside Avenue office, “is just how far superior these materials like fiber are. Today’s manufacturing is so cumbersome and expensive. The 3D printing we do here is essentially additive manufacturing. But this is the future of manufacturing.”
Simon added the Coeur d’Alene area was the perfect place to set up shop for this particular line of business.
“Coeur d’Alene is just a great place for technology to grow,” she said. “It’s a great place for start-ups and growing businesses to come. It’s a great lifestyle here, not too expensive. And you have entreprenurial leaders who are willing to devote themselves to help. Five universities are really close, so there are research options and workforce options.”
Alvarado concurred just before running back to the Los Angeles trade show, saying that while his contracts were mainly military, he would concede the importance of having some fun with his product, adding that he couldn’t help but smile when thinking about the Formula One team in negotiations with Continuous Composites.
“The strategic partnership formed through this joint development agreement with Sartomer [a subsidiary of Arkema] recognizes the potential of our IP by combining our strong technical team and extensive patent portfolio with their industry-leading materials and development horsepower,” he said. “This partnership has already allowed us to extend our lead while creating an additional revenue stream for our stakeholders.”