Tibial tray connected to aerospace sector

There are thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of people in the United States who are walking around with Manitoba-made metal parts in their bodies.

After Winnipeg-based manufacturing solutions provider Precision ADM Inc. got started in 2015, one of its first jobs was fabricating U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved tibial trays — a critical component for knee replacement surgery that transmits loads from the femur to the tibia, ensuring stability, alignment and durability over millions of cycles of use.

Manufacturing the tibial trays for a client in the U.S. stands out as a vivid memory for Martin Petrak, the company’s co-founder and president.

“We made something that could go into a human, that should be there for the rest of their life,” he says. “We thought, we’ve finally done something significant here as an organization, as a company, with staff that believed that we could do this.”

A decade later, Precision ADM identifies, develops and manufactures high-value components and device applications for the medical, aerospace, energy and industrial sectors.

To do this, the company employs additive manufacturing — the use of 3D printers to create metallic, plastic and plastic-composite components — as a core technology. (ADM stands for advanced digital manufacturing.)

Precision ADM provides clients with digital manufacturing design and/or manufacturing solutions to make their products more efficient and functional than those made with conventional methods.

The tibial tray, for example, would otherwise be made using a casting process that would first necessitate making a mould. If a company was trying out a new design, the trial-and-error process that leads to successfully creating a component could take months.

Additive manufacturing can shave a significant amount of time off that process, Petrak says, meaning companies can iterate quicker and get the parts they’re designing faster (while maintaining quality).

At Precision ADM’s 14,000-square-foot headquarters in an industrial park in St. Boniface, employees have set up a table that displays an array of parts the company has manufactured.

Among them are a metallic implant used in spinal surgery and a high-end military exoskeleton that assists soldiers in carrying heavy loads.

One of the company’s more unique projects resulted when a Fisheries and Oceans Canada researcher approached Precision ADM.

“We helped them design a kind of projectile that almost looked like a long dart that they could use from a drone to take a sample of this narwhal that was basically offshore (and) very hard to get to,” Petrak says.

The polymer instrument had to meet a number of specifications.

“You have this dart that gets dropped from a drone, but then the thing has to float enough even though it has a sample and has a bunch of metal on the bottom of it,” Petrak says. “(We) had to create this literally almost cartoon-like system.”

Precision ADM’s genesis traces back to Petrak’s time as president and CEO at the Orthopaedic Innovation Centre at Concordia Hospital in Winnipeg.

There, a team of engineers, technologists and surgeons test medical devices, develop custom tests and perform biomechanical testing for orthopaedic implants and personal protective equipment.

At the time, the team was exploring how to make lower-cost medical devices for the Canadian market. They developed technologies that were manufactured by a company in the U.S. using 3D printing. After two years, General Electric acquired the company.

“All of a sudden, all that know-how of how to make these parts was gone,” Petrak recalls.

Petrak and some of his colleagues raised funding to launch a hub for advanced manufacturing for the medical and aerospace industries. Thus began Precision ADM.

Today, the company is a contract manufacturer that employs around 20 people. About 75 per cent of Precision ADM’s clients are in the Canada, Petrak says.

One area of the company’s headquarters houses four German-made 3D printers (EOS M 290 models). A fifth one is on the way as demand for the company’s services rises, Petrak says.

While he doesn’t share the company’s annual revenue, he says it will likely double this year.

“All sectors are growing,” he says.

“Energy is very big. There are some very unique capabilities that we’re working on with a client that’s trying to redesign low-emission components for gas turbine engines and leveraging metal additive super alloy technology to achieve those new outcomes.”

Use of additive manufacturing is indeed on the rise across a number of industries.

On Thursday, American defence and aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corp. announced advances in its 3D printing manufacturing process to enable faster operational readiness of next-generation aircraft, hypersonic systems and electric propulsion platforms.

Petrak is actively pursuing defence contracts for Precision ADM.

In March, he and Derek VanDenDriessche, vice-president of sales, attended a defence, security and aerospace trade show in Calgary. The executives hope to attract the federal government’s attention as it increases investment in defence spending.

“We’re not in Quebec, we’re not in Ontario (two major hubs for defence manufacturing), we’re in Manitoba and we’re doing things like companies are in those two other larger provinces,” Petrak says. “And we, hopefully, can not only meet their expectations, but exceed them, given the fact that we have this nimble operation.”

Precision ADM has spent nearly 16 years flying under the radar to an extent, and VanDenDriessche hopes that changes.

“Nobody really knows what we do here in Winnipeg and it feels like it’s almost an untapped gem,” he says. “If people realized what we were working on, I think everybody would be surprised.”

Ultimately, Petrak says, innovative manufacturing and helping customers is what Precision ADM is all about.

“(I enjoy) the opportunities to help our clients rethink how they conventionally made their products and being able to rapidly provide them with new solutions in ways they just didn’t think were imaginable.”

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca