The coils and rods of metal in shades of copper and gold leave Materion’s Shoemakersville-area plant thin enough to be measured by the millionths of an inch. They are machined so precisely that they can stabilize the cameras in smartphones or keep an airplane’s electrical system operating safely.
Materion Brush Performance Alloys recently spent nearly $2 million on upgrades to the machinery at the Perry Township plant, allowing the company to improve the quality of its products and increase capacity to keep up with demand. The local plant is part of the world’s biggest manufacturer of beryllium metal, a light metal with high strength and good conductivity.
Locally, the plant is busy and hiring more employees, said plant manager Jeff Schirm.
“We’re going to have a really busy second half of the year,” he said. “The order book is really full.”
The company started as Penn Precision. Brush Wellman, which later changed its name to Materion Corp., bought the company in 1957. The Perry plant is one of the Ohio-based company’s production facilities. Materion’s local plant produces rod and wire and strip metal and employs 145.
Materion mines beryllium in Utah and sends it to a plant in Ohio, where the metal is combined with nickel or copper. The metal goes to the Perry plant, where machines stretch a portion of the metals down to smaller diameters or thinner gauges, known as drawing, and then spool the strips or cut them into rods.
The plant also produces strip product, thin sheets of metal, which is stretched thinner and thinner on two rolling mills.
A $1.2 million upgrade added an X-ray gauge to each mill in January. The previous electronic measuring system touched and often marked the thin sheets. The new gauges give more accurate measurements and keep the product consistent.
“Our customers, they don’t want the variations down the coil,” Schirm said.
Then the strip is cleaned and sent to a furnace for mill-hardening to make it stronger for or annealing to make it more flexible, and then cut.
On the rod side of the plant, a new $750,000 drawing line can stretch the metal thinner and thinner. Workers used to take the coils onto four separate machines to do the same work before Materion activated the new drawing line at the end of last year.
Adding the machine will allow the plant to dedicate the old drawing lines to the beryllium alloy needed as a 4G wireless network expands in China, Schirm said.
The wire is straightened and cut into rods or spooled and then sent onto customers that machine it into connector parts.
The metal is sent to distributors and customers worldwide, ending up in smartphones, planes and vehicles.
Materion is well-positioned, especially as the only fully integrated beryllium producer, mining the metal and then manufacturing the product, said Marco Rodriguez, director of research and senior analyst at Stonegate Securities Inc., Dallas.
“They’re one of the larger players out there that can use their scale to their advantage,” he said.
Last year was a challenging year for the parent company, due to a skittish economy and reduced demand for the products of customers. Since then, conditions have improved, especially in the consumer electronics and defense markets.
“It seems to be moving a bit into the positive side,” Rodriguez said.
The company is focused on growth opportunities and has worked closely with customers to find new ways to use the beryllium products.
Contact Erin Negley: 610-371-5047 or enegley@readingeagle.com.
