The Laser Show

There are three portrait photos hanging high on the wall in the conference room at Hayden Corp. in West Springfield.

From left to right, they are Dan Hayden's great-grandfather, Charles Elisha; his grandfather, Charles Wesley (everyone called him Wes); and his father, John, who together account for roughly 90 years of entrepreneurship, innovation, and business diversity - all traditions that Dan is continuing today.

Indeed, the company that started out making wire cloth for cylinder molds in the region's many paper mills has been a study in industrial evolution over the past century or so.

Under Wes Hayden's direction, said his grandson, the company started to handle a variety of different services for the paper industry, especially through a process known as metalizing, or the technique of coating metal to strengthen and protect it. Over the years, the process has benefited from new materials - as well as new techniques and equipment for applying them - but the basic principle is the same.

As the paper industry continued its decline in the '60s and '70s, however, John Hayden saw a clear need to further diversify the family business, and did so. He expanded the company's reach into several new sectors, including the plastics industry, computer components, the pump and valve markets, sporting goods (golf clubs), and especially the military.

Hayden has handled coating work on a number of Los Angeles and Nimitz Class submarines, both at Quonset Point, Conn., where they're built, and at Groton, Conn., where they're repaired and overhauled.

"We've done missile-hatch doors, anchoring points, lots of valves, work inside the sail, in the reactor holds, all over the submarines," he explained. "It's been a good niche for us."

And under Dan's direction, the company, now with 36 employees, has diversified further in recent years through a large-scale investment in laser-cladding technology, used to coat and thus protect equipment used in especially harsh environments. Companies that drill for oil and natural gas have become the best customers for Hayden's laser division, said Dan, adding that that other markets have been developed and more are being explored with the goal of maximizing the company's sizable investment in this technology.

Today, Dan carries on in the tradition of the Haydens who came before him, meaning ongoing work to identify new growth markets - renewable energy and especially windpower could hold vast potential in the years and decades to come - and strategies for taking the company's name to places it's never been before, in both a literal and figurative sense.

For this issue and its focus on the region's manufacturing sector, BusinessWest goes inside Hayden's plant in West Springfield for a look at a company with plenty of history that, in many respects, continues to repeat itself.

Steeling the Show

As he talked with BusinessWest, Hayden pointed out the windows of the company's conference room toward the front of the property. The half-acre or so of land was barren, with large holes in the ground where several 60-year-old trees toppled by the June 1 tornado once stood.

"It went right around us," he said of the twister, adding that the falling trees shattererd several windows, and there was some roof damage, but nothing significant enough to close the plant. "The front won't look like that for long ... we're going to plant some new trees and get some things growing out there."

In many respects, that's what the company's been doing since Charles Elisha Hayden left a job with the paper maker Chaney Bigelow in Springfield and started his own company, which he called Hayden Wire Works because of its primary product, wire cloth for the paper industry.

As the evolutionary process unfolded over the next several decades, the name on the door was changed to Hayden Corp., said Dan, adding that a collection of several dozen photos in a room off the conference area tells the story of how the company became a pioneer of sorts in on-site spray-coating of paper-making equipment and machinery.

Wes Hayden was an avid photographer, and he took many shots in the field, Dan continued, meaning the plants where the company's teams used early techniques in metalizing to lengthen the lifespans of metal machinery and parts.

"At that time, the company was going out and finding machine parts that had worn down and using metalizing to repair them," he explained. "If you try to weld material, the metal will bend and distort, but if you use thermal spraying, you can build it back up without distorting, and that was my grandfather's big selling point."

Metalizing has come a long way since then, he said, noting that, in some cases, products are applied with heat and force supplied by what amounts to a rocket engine, and robots now handle the bulk of the sctual coating work in the plant.

The process is inherently quite simple, yet one of the many challenges Hayden and others at the company face is trying to explain how it works. "It's a hard concept for some clients to wrap their heads around," he said. "One potential customer asked, 'how long does it take to dry?' It's dry when it's applied - it's molten metal.

"One of our challenges is to educate potential new users about what this technology can do and what it can't do," he continued, adding that the company is addressing this issue through participation in a number of manufacturers' trade shows, including EASTEC, which has come to West Springfield the past several years, and also the annual FABTEC show in Illinois.

To illustrate just how much confusion exists about the company's work and product lines, Hayden relayed a story from one of many projects at Electric Boat, this one involving organized labor.

"The aluminizing process that we apply to the submarines uses a combustion gun and aluminum wire, and we literally spray aluminum onto the parts we're covering," he explained. "From a distance, it looks very much like spray-painting because the aluminum is white. It happened that we were down there when the painters' union was on strike, and we were given some hassle at the entryway because people believed we were scab painters."

Metal Winners

While hard to explain and relatively unknown to those outside the client industry groups, the thermal spray-coating businesses is established enough to have its own trade group, the International Thermal Spray Assoc., said Hayden, and large enough for his company to record more than $6 million in sales annually.

That number has risen steadily over the years, as successive generations continued to develop new markets and new techniques. The latest manifestation of that tradition came four years ago, when Dan Hayden took the lead role in development of Hayden Laser Services (HLS). It was created to serve its still-primary client source - the oil and gas industry - and now accounts for between 10% and 15% of annual revenues. Explaining how the laser works, Hayden said it goes further than traditional thermal spraying, and is a more effective process for extremely harsh conditions.

"The thermal spray coatings that are the bulk of our business are mechanically bonded; they're very tough materials, but they can be chipped away if they're impacted or otherwise overstressed," he explained. "The laser coatings are actually welded onto the surface; the process with the laser actually creates a weld bead, so the overlay materials become fully bonded to and alloyed with the substrate. This makes for a very durable, impact-proof coating, which is especially important with oil-drilling tools that go deep into the earth and see a lot of abuse."

"It's a small business unit," he continued, referring to HLS, "but we have a good share of the market, and the market continues to grow."

And while HLS has handled mostly oil and gas equipment, there have been some interesting exceptions, said Hayden.

"The unique combination of low heat input and true metallurgical bonding offered by laser cladding makes this technique ideal for repairing and restoring dimensionally sensitive components that have worn over time, and one great example is the steering worm from a classic Deere tractor that came into our shop recently," he said. "The tapered bearing fits at each end of the worm had become pitted and worn, and the resulting sloppy fit made the steering box unusable. The particular worm gear had been manufactured on special equipment that allowed the sector shaft to follow a curved contact path on its spiral track through the worm. Not only are the pieces no longer manufactured, the unique equipment used to make them is nearly impossible to find. Restoration of the bearing fits would be the only way to recover the part.

"Using our three-dimensional scanner, we were able to create a model of the worn piece that we could use for programming," he continued. "We applied a layer of stainless steel, using the tightly controlled laser metal deposition process, and ground the overlay back to the proper size to fit the bearings. The result is a piece that is good as new and ready to hit the road again."

Looking ahead, Hayden said the search for new markets and new applications for the company's many services is ongoing, with several growth opportunities identified in everything from light rail to the renewable energy fields.

"There is considerable potential in light rail handling rotating components - corrosion protection and wear protection on axels, bearings, and shafts," he explained. "But there's also room for more growth in oil and gas, and also renewable energy as well."

All's Weld That Ends Weld

Hayden said it will be some time before there's a fourth portrait hanging in the company's conference room.

"The hair will probably have to be gray before that happens," he said, acknowledging that, in most cases, the portraits on the wall depict his predecessors late in their careers.

But while he hasn't joined them in that respect yet, he has certainly carried on the tradition of entrepreneurship and diversification that has enabled the company to not only survive 90 years and several succession processes, but thrive.

As those portraits, and Wes Hayden's pictures, show, the Hayden company is a shining example of perseverance and industrial creativity - in more ways than one.