Business View Magazine | December 2019

148 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2019 consists of a 175,000-square-foot main building, which contains its office and showroom, in addition to an engineering and manufacturing plant. A second building, situated one mile north of Dale, houses the company’s software development team, IT department, web servers, and network hardware. They also have a service facility in the United Kingdom. “Our main push right now has been toward the LSAMs,” says Susnjara. “A lot of R&D work goes into that. We do, however continually push R&D for our CNC machining line.” “We consider LSAMs an emerging technology,” adds Palmer. “Right now, we feel we’re the only company in the world capable of doing what we’re doing; that’s to make large scale tooling out of carbon-infused polymer that has no voids or porosity issues and needs no coating.” To date, Thermwood’s machines and patented processes have been used to create parts for commercial airliner interiors, helicopter blades, and the underlayment of space shuttles. NASA even used Thermwood machines to build the Mars Flyer and Mars Lander. One of the company’s philosophies, even back when it was strictly a furniture wood-polymer composite business, is the notion that service is key. “A lot of our repeat business is because of our service,” Palmer insists. “And a lot of our business is repeat business. We make our own control system. When we got into large-scale additive manufacturing, we created our own slicing software that married with our machinery. Whenever we want to make modifications, we can do it ourselves. We don’t have to worry about a third-party software vendor. What we say around here is: ‘If it doesn’t move, we paint it. If it moves, we patent it.’” “Everyone else builds a steel structure, puts rails on it,” says Susnjara. “They have drives and they do this, that, and the other. What separates us from them is our service and support. We manufacture the guts of our own controller