PRC Composites

containers; and then there are the compos- ite containers that we make.”And, he be- lieves that for the type of high value items that its customers ship, their product is far superior to either wood or metal because composite containers are reusable, they can be completely sealed, and they’re much lighter than steel and generally lighter than heavy volumes of aluminum. Eighty percent of the company’s business is as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense and a supplier of shipping contain- ers to the commercial aircraft industry. Its 120 employees work out of a 100,000-sq.- ft. facility in Ontario, and another, smaller building the company recently acquired in nearby Chino, when it bought Globe Plas- tics, a small injection molding firm, last August. “We’re also getting involved more in commercial applications,” adds Gregory. “We’re trying to diversify to allow for the ups and downs and some of the challenges in the other industries.”Other products that PRC manufactures include manway covers for service stations and ADA, or tactile tile, that is used on street corners to notify the blind that they’re about to walk out into traffic. But composite containers are still the company’s mainstay; it has two long-term, major military contracts and one with a major commercial airline manufacturer. “The first one is for General Atomics,” says Director of Engineering, Thomas Aktins. “We’ve been making the containers for all of their Predator drones since 1995. These were originally made in smaller volumes than they currently are. So, the manufactur- PRC COMPOSITES ing process is of an older type – this open mold arrangement which was suitable at the time in the late ‘90s and early 2000s for the volume that they had.” More recently, though, Atkins says that the vol- ume of the aircraft being manufactured increased dramatically, and the design has been changed, as well. So, the company went to work to reconfigure the internals of its container in order to accom- modate the new design while staying true to the legacy manufacturing process that the military requires from its contractors. “There was a lot of throwaway dunnage – the bub- ble wrap and tape and things they used to package up the small components within the aircraft,”Atkins relates. “Those were problematic to the end user in that they would blow away or cause flaws in the aircraft and not be easily re-prepared when they needed to re-ship the container. So, we instituted a shadow box design which had dedicated cut outs in some foam that were permanently in- stalled in the container so that they could put all Eighty percent of the company’s business is as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense and a supplier of ship- ping containers to the commercial aircraft industry.