Advanced Materials Refashions Blue Ridge Industry
Published Mar 23, 2009
John Hauser is executive director of the Northwest North Carolina Advanced Materials Cluster.
For parts of Western North Carolina, the new textiles are fibers made of carbon or glass, and the new mills make components for airlines, vehicles and construction.
Advanced materials are the target of a public-private partnership in Ashe, Alleghany and Wilkes counties as a way to replace jobs and identity lost in the departure of furniture and textile plants.
The Northwest North Carolina Advanced Materials Cluster is based at Wilkes Community College and counts as its partners county leaders, businesses, economic development agencies and other colleges.
“One of its biggest assets is giving the region an identity, giving it a name,” says Grant Godwin, vice president and general manager at Martin Marietta Composites. “It has been through some very hard times. People, I think, generally felt manufacturing was dead and wondered how the area was going to transition. By putting it under a common banner, it gave it an identity, a banner for an industry that could have a good future in that area.”
Martin Marietta, an early champion of the cluster, uses materials such as fiber-reinforced polymers and advanced glass fabrics to build truck bodies, trailers and other vehicle products, including some work for the military, at its plant in Sparta. In late 2008, the plant employed 54; Godwin expects the ranks to top 220.
GE Aviation, formerly Smiths Aerospace, built a $44 million plant in 2006 to manufacture engine components in West Jefferson.
MX Aircraft relocated from Boynton Beach, Fla., to North Wilkesboro in 2008 and is building a larger facility on the Wilkes County Airport’s east side, scheduled to open in 2009. MX alone will mean 50 to 75 jobs.
“We are not focused on big companies but small entrepreneurial companies. We can hit a lot of singles,” says John Hauser, dean of industrial, engineering and CIT at Wilkes Community College. Hauser also serves as the cluster’s executive director.
Other initiatives include career readiness certification as well as supporting robotics, automation and advanced-materials courses at high schools, and offering related two-year degrees at local community colleges.
Representatives of the cluster, using private and government grants, go to manufacturing sites when equipment is upgraded to help retrain workers.
The region’s workforce is well suited for working with composites, Godwin says.
“Furniture makers are accustomed to working with adhesives, and now we have textiles for advanced structural composites,” he says. “Textiles aren’t dead. They’ve just been redefined.”
The cluster may expand to include other counties. Hauser remembers the day county managers from Wilkes, Alleghany and Ashe met with him. Any competitiveness quickly gave way to cooperation. “The collaboration across governments has been phenomenal,” he says.
Story by Pamela Coyle
Photo by Todd Bennett
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