By Nathan Peck | MiBiz
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

DOUGLAS — While you may never touch one of Geoff Humberton’s products, odds are his products helped create many of the products you use today.

From reflective coatings to jet turbine blades, vacuum castings play an important role in a variety of industries. Those products require vacuum pumps, the majority made by Stokes, to remove the air from casting chambers. When one of those Stokes pumps break down, the 13 employees of Metallurgical High Vacuum Corp. step in to rebuild them. After years of doing rebuilds on Stokes vacuum pumps, Humberton saw the opportunity to build a better pump. Six years of reverse engineering and making improvements later, Humberton is now bringing his pumps to market.

“We started building our own vacuum pumps because we knew we could do it better. It is expensive doing that sort of engineering,” Humberton said.

Humberton started Metallurgical High Vacuum, a remanufacturer of vacuum process equipment, in Holland in 1981 as a consulting business, first to Donnelly Corp. and later to the vacuum forging and metal coating industries. As Humberton works to develop a market for his pumps, he understands his company faces a difficult road in carving out a niche in the market.

“We are seeing an influx of offshore pumps from India and China,” Humberton said. “We are now the only producer of these pumps in the United States. It has been a tough sell.”

The pumps are used in the process of forging high-quality aluminum parts for applications such as jet turbine blades. In the automotive supply industry, vacuums are used to coat the plastic components with a thin covering of metal for applications such as headlight reflectors.

Metallurgical High Vacuum is working to move demonstration models into its customer’s shops to prove their worth. Typically, vacuum pumps require servicing after 10,000 to 12,000 hours of use. MHV’s models can go more than 40,000 hours before servicing, reducing the downtime for shops and increasing their cycle times. Manufacturers in the Midwest are seeing the recovery firsthand, but Humberton said his customers are still reluctant to make major capital purchases at this point.
“We’re trying to give them away for free,” Humberton said with a laugh. “We think that if customers see they will have faster cycle times, they will sell themselves. There is interest at this point, but it is still difficult trying to get purchase orders at this time.”

MHV’s pumps sell for 30 percent more than their foreign competition, and Humberton said that the company is hoping to differentiate their product through their superior quality.

“Now there are significant quality issues there (with foreign pumps), but that is going to change, as they get more time to work on them,” Humberton said. “But you are not going to see companies going offshore for these large castings.”

MHV has branched out into some custom work for its clients, drawing on the firm’s engineering and manufacturing strengths. The company recently completed a vacuum chamber for an Ann Arbor manufacturer of liquid crystal displays. While a one-off piece of machinery, Humberton said MHV works closely with customers to find customized solutions for their needs.

“We’ve got more in-house manufacturing capability than other rebuilders, and a lot of engineering capability,” Humberton said. “We are reaching out to more customers and calling on more shops.

While the last two years have been tough for MHV and Michigan manufacturers in general, Humberton is optimistic. Their rebuilding business is picking up, indicating that their customers are putting strains on their casting and coating machinery and are requiring servicing.

“The last two years were dismal,” Humberton said. “The first part of this year, we are starting to see that something good is happening.”