In an unassuming East Granby office park, a soft-spoken homegrown engineer is revolutionizing the wire and stamping industry.
And he’s doing it with a laser.
Scott Boynton, 25, sketched the concept for the Laser Splice in a meeting with a client that needed to weld thinner material into longer strips for shipping to manufacturers. Six months later, Boynton and the rest of the team at Joining Technologies, Inc. produced an automated laser welding machine capable of joining sheets 0.002 of an inch thick — four times thinner than when welded manually.
“As the interest keeps building from other customers, it is very likely we will be building more,” Boynton said.
Companies in the wire and stamping industry want to produce longer spools of material to sell because manufacturers in the steel-converting industry can reduce the costly down time taken by threading new spools into their machines, said Dave Hudson, Joining Technologies CEO. Longer spools also cut down on operator error and machine wear caused by spool replacement.
The Laser Splice — whose name may be changed to Infinite Web, depending on trademark availability — enables the wire and stamping industry to produce spools of infinite length with almost zero failure rate, Hudson said.
The first client, whose manual welding for these spools had an 85-percent failure rate, reports a 200-percent increase in efficiency. The Laser Splice gives the client such a competitive advantage in the industry, the company doesn’t want to be identified publicly, Hudson said.
After three months in the field, the Laser Splice has created enough buzz that requests are pouring in, even though the cost runs three times the old technology, which already runs near $100,000. Joining Technologies will produce three more Laser Splices by the end of the year, Hudson said.
“It represents a new direction for the company,” Hudson said. “We want to provide answers to the industry. We don’t want to be just a job shop.”
Founded in 1992, Joining Technologies became an expert in laser welding by the end of the decade. As advances in technology drove down costs and made laser welding competitive to electron beam welding, the company flourished. Today, it employs 55 people.
The company’s focus always has been subcontracting welding jobs and fixing and improving equipment for clients. The Laser Splice changes all that, Hudson said.
With more employees like Boynton, Joining Technologies wants to develop patents such as those for portions of the Laser Splice; explore new technologies; and work with major companies for welding contracts.
“We want this to be a think tank environment,” Hudson said. “Our goal is to be the leader in North America in bringing laser welding … to the industry.”
One step in this new direction is giving Boynton more authority in research and development, Hudson said, and in hiring new engineers he can mentor down the company’s new path.
“This kid is super talented,” said Bob Sproat, managing principal at The Idea Place, Inc., which performed an employee assessment for Joining Technologies. “You don’t see that kind of brilliance come along that often.”
Boynton, who grew up in East Granby, was employed by Joining Technologies before he graduated East Granby High School. He’s a born engineer and began sending out resumes to various companies at age 17. Joining Technologies picked him up immediately and mentored him through his time at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he received his bachelor’s degree in manufacturing and engineering technology.
He is further adding to his expertise by studying computer systems engineering. Inventions such as the Laser Splice, need more than 7,000 lines of software code to operate consistently.
As complex as the Laser Splice is, Boynton describes its development as a matter of time and effort. From a concept sketch of a device that could cut and weld two pieces of thin metal together, Boynton and three others developed a workable model from existing parts and $10,000 of custom machining. “The complexity went through the roof, but it worked,” Boynton said.
From the first model, three more months passed before the Laser Splice was in the field; but the device has operated in good condition for its first three months, Boynton said.
To honor Boynton for his role in developing the Laser Splice, Joining Technologies created a new award — The Thomas A. Edison Award for Technology Innovation — for employees who develop influential technology. It represents the work the company wants to do in the future, Hudson said.
“This hadn’t happened all that often, but I’m betting real money that it will happen a lot more often in the future,” Hudson said.
