VIDEO: Precision fabrication of honeycomb materials

CompositesWorld editors visited the MachineTek LLC (Carlsbad, Calif., U.S.) booth at CAMX 2024, where Kevin Darroch, president at MachineTek, discussed the company’s expertise in machining honeycomb material.

Transcript excerpt

Scott Francis, CW

MachineTek is a specialist in honeycomb and foam core components for the aerospace and defense industries.

For more than 30 years, it has provided services such as custom machining, deep forming, potting, bonding, fixtures, design and fabrication, as well as engineering support.

Kevin Darroch, MachineTek

Formed in 1992, we’ve been focusing on exactly the same nuanced and specialized services ever since we were incorporated back in those days.

And as you look here, this is an example of the types of honeycomb we would frequently machine. We start off with blocks or sheets of honeycomb. We order to our customer’s specifications. At that point, we bring in their CAD models. We have our engineering team create our own tooling and our own tool paths and then we use, in most cases, our five-axis CNC equipment to create the shapes that you see here.

So this would have started off as a block of honeycomb, Nomex in this case. But as you can tell, we’ve created a fairly complex shape, and this is for an acoustic application. Most of our applications are actually for core components in the aerospace industry — and that means aircraft, but now more spacecraft as well.