People hate to fly with me. Airplanes make me fidgety. I’m constantly moving my seat up and down, and at the slightest turbulence grabbing onto both armrests for dear life. Inevitably someone will ask: “Are you scared of heights?”
“No,” I say. “I’m scared of engineers.”
You see, I have always likened airplanes to my first car—a broken down 1982 Buick with a transmission and engine that repeatedly exploded one summer. Both Buicks and airplanes are big, gray and engineered — that defective piece of my brain will tell me — and if one can fall apart in mid-trip, why not the other?
No longer will I ask that question; not after swinging by Connecticut Metallurgical Inc., in East Hartford’s Prestige Park. That’s where I came to appreciate the immense amount of thought, effort and testing that goes into putting together airplanes, particularly their engines, many of which are made by the nearby Pratt & Whitney.
You see, the firm is one of only a handful of companies in the nation that tests for “metal creep.” That is, how much stress and heat a chunk of metal can take before it deforms or rips apart.
“Basically, we heat it up and let it sit there,” said General Manager Tom Strenk, as he showed me around the 90 or so creep-testing machines in his lab.
They look like giant weight-lifting machines, and work like a medieval torture device.
One side holds a big pot that heats metals, such as titanium, to temperatures beyond 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit. On the other side, testers like Tom add 10-pound weights to one side of a lever, which pulls on the metal being tested inside the pot.
A nearby computer tells how much the material “creeps.”
Connecticut Metallurgical’s staff is small – about 10 people – but they play a big role, Strenk said: helping engineers figure out whether what they build, like an engine, can do what it’s supposed to – not fall apart mid-trip.
That made me feel a lot better about flying.
Strenk’s firm isn’t the only Prestige Park business making climbing into the air a little better.
Regional Stairs, just down the road, makes custom-designed stairs for houses and condos all across Greater Hartford. The company moved to East Hartford in 2005, but founders Andrew Gawronski and Jake Strebyko started the business in Willimantic 10 years ago.
If you’ve been in a house built by Briarwood Homes in Suffield, or in the Whitney Crossing development in Vernon, you’ve probably seen their handiwork.
But Prestige Park’s most unusual business award has to be its newest tenant, InterDISPLAY Group Inc., which is in a business you probably never conceived of. You know the racks that they hang sunglasses on in department and stores? They build ‘em.
Founders Miguel and Minerva Rodriguez just relocated their business here from Long Island in October. Although they employ only a handful of people at the moment, they’ve told town officials they will have up to 30 employees within the next two years.
Kenneth J. St. Onge is associate editor of the Hartford Business Journal.
