The right connections
Little Falls plant's products are even in missiles
LITTLE FALLS - Just across the river from downtown Little Falls is a modest industrial park housing the local operations of Airborn, Inc. The Airborn plant looks like every other fairly quiet operation taking place in the same business park - until you walk through their doors. Then it's time to bring out the earplugs.
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Airborn, Little Falls (formerly Central Minnesota Tools) was launched in 1986 in Cushing. The company moved to Little Falls in 1990.
Brainerd Dispatch/Steve Kohls
Airborn, formerly Central Minnesota Tool, manufactures what Engineering Manager Jason Smith calls "high reliability connectors." All kinds of connectors. Airborn's final products find their way into everything, from humidity proof telephone jacks to missiles. Yes, missiles.
More than two decades ago, before Airborn took over the operation in Little Falls, Central Minnesota Tool was founded by Lorence Eckblad, along with partners George Gold and Steve Solem. The company started in Cushing building tools for Polaris and Nordicat.
Airborn manufactuing is central Minnesota's only stamping, molding and automation plant. Airborn manufactures its own tools to create components used in high-tech connectors.Brainerd Dispatch/Steve Kohls
Before taking ownership of Central Minnesota Tool, Airborn Inc. was a long-time customer of the connector company. In 2007, Airborn approached the company with the buy-out proposition. Gold and Solem retired after the transition while Eckblad stayed on as the director of Technology and New Products. Central Minnesota Tool moved to Little Falls in 1990 and has been operating in its current facility since 2000.
Airborn Inc. is headquartered in Georgetown, Texas, and employs approximately 1,200 individuals at plants in four states - Minnesota, Texas, Arkansas and Pennsylvania and Canada and England. Airborn is 100 percent employee-owned.
Airborn specializes in diversity. The company works with clients in aerospace/avionic, industrial, defense, medical, geophysical and automotive technology. Approximately 40 percent of their production is military/aerospace specific. Not only does the company manufacture the connectors, in most cases it designs and builds the machinery that creates the final product, making the company a true concept to product operation.
CAD enginer Kevin Reker designed tools that will potentially be used to machine the tools needed to create various components used in Airborn connectors.
Brainerd Dispatch/Steve Kohls
Chances are most people own at least one product that contains a connector that may have been manufactured by Airborn. Their products are found in the fuse boxes of Chrysler and Dodge vehicles, the smart card reader on satellite television boxes, and if you happen to own a space module bound for the surface of Mars, that contains about a dozen Airborn connectors, too.
Smith said a connector is what holds together the wires or circuit board in any one of their customer's final products. While the concept sounds simple, the function is very complex. With some connectors having thousands of points of contact - like the F-22 connector with it's 47,000 contacts on one connector, manufacturing is a intricate science.
The nature of final products, like fighter aircraft and high-powered missiles, leave little room for error throughout the entire manufacturing process. Smith said that Airborn Little Falls produces about 60 million parts annually with errors in just pieces per million.Airborn maintains a Six Sigma standard with 99.997 percent accuracy in their production process- the highest level of quality control.
Approximately 70 employees, including 10 engineers, ensure the process is as close to perfect as perfect can be. With some connectors containing contacts less than one-sixth the diameter of a human hair, the accuracy of the position of each contact is essential. Even the machines that build the tools that build the connectors are subjected to rigorous testing for accuracy.
Airborn's manufacturing plant is a maze of production. The entire plant requires the use of safety goggles and, depending on the room, could also require earplugs and hairnets.
The production process will often start in the plant's Electrical Discharge Machine room - where manufacturing tools are created and tested before they are used in the molding process.
The "clean room"- which comes with a required hairnet rule - is used to perform all final assembly on various components and has five quality check points to ensure optimal accuracy. The room is also where final assembly takes place for connectors for bombs/missiles, aircraft, telecommunications and industrial equipment.
The largest, and loudest room in the plant, is where the stamping takes place. Each contact used in a connector comes on a large spool of metal and is "stamped" or punched out through an automatic feed system. Eckblad said that the stamping automation is capable of producing four-six million parts over a two-and-a-half day period or about 800 stampings a minute.
In 2008, the company reached nearly one billion stampings. "Each one of those stampings becomes a connection point," Smith said.
Airborn maintains a sample of every reel stamped. For automotive parts, the samples are kept for five years compared to military samples, which are kept forever.
Because the materials used are almost all recyclable, Airborn has very little production waste. Plastics and metals are melted down, reformed and used over and over again. Most Airborn products contain recycled material with the exception of some medical products that require "virgin material," Eckblad said.
Smith said the company recycles approximately 10-12 pallets of material each month.
Eckblad said that economic and industrial changes have led Airborn to shift away from building parts for automotive companies, and brought an increase in the demand for military and aviation parts. With nearly half of its efforts going into military and aviation parts manufacturing, it is safe to say Airborn's Little Falls production is soaring, no- it's exploding.
SARAH NELSON may be reached at sarah.nelson@brainerddispatch.com or 855-5879.