About EC!

Hi, My name is Chris and this is Explore Composites!

I’m going to explain what’s happening here: why I’m building this web site, where it’s going, and what I have spent the last 15 years doing to learn this stuff.

Why Explore Composites! ?

I started this project after we closed the small job-shop I’d been co-running. My days went from super busy to doing consulting work, parenting and working through a plan for a new business that never went anywhere. It was nice to have flexible time, but I missed building stuff every day and having my hands in the process – instead of in CAD models and calls from far away. At the same time, I kept having conversations with customers and friends in the composite industry about how to build things, and how to build and run businesses. These discussions ranged from designing molds to managing employees to fixing broken machines – and they were fun! One evening I was writing a long email about how to make MDF molds and thought “maybe I shouldn’t just send this to this one person…” This could be an article!

So I added an “articles” section to my website and wrote some more – focusing on the details – things it would be really useful to know. I’d be that guy who’d answer somebody’s question with “here, look at my article” – like a total nerd. But people I didn’t know started calling and emailing me with questions – students building Formula SAE cars, people buying CNC routers and vacuum pumps.

Soon things got out of hand, and I decided to make it a thing of its own. I chose the name “Explore Composites!” – that’s what I’ve been doing all these years and it’s what I want to share. The exclamation point is because I get excited about stuff. I love writing about the technical aspects of composites work and I am really excited about the chance to learn more as I build EC!.

After years of trying to help customers and friends have success with composites, I know the struggles faced by both manufacturers and potential customers for the technology. It is confusing – there are so many options to choose from and obscure details and minor decisions have a huge impact on the overall success of a project. Composite materials have so much potential for being part of a better, smarter and more efficient future – lets work together to share the knowledge!

Check out the Contribute page to see how you can share your knowledge too and be part of building Explore Composites!

My Plans for EC!

I’m working on this as I have time and would love to roll in as much knowledge as possible to help people have success with composites. It has been a huge boost to my own learning curve and a lot of fun!

As of now this is just a hobby/side project and I don’t have an immediate plan to try to make money off the work I’m doing to put EC! together. If it gets to be too much trouble or I see a benefit to the project by doing it – I may look into advertising or car washes or bake sales or something. Any ideas? My main goal though is to keep the information all freely available and somewhat organized. No, I’m not really sure where its going!

Who is this guy?

My professional background is in building boats. When I was in college I got really excited about boats and realized that I could actually make one – probably because it was about the exact opposite of what I was studying. Up to that point most of my “building” had been either writing code (yup, nerd) in the computer or nailing together junk to make forts and strange vehicles as a kid – and leaving nails on the driveway. The idea that I could read a set of plans, go buy materials, do a bunch of sequential operations and end up with a boat was like magic!

My first boat was a 20′ wooden sailboat that I tried to rebuild, messed up, cut up and then started over new. It was ok, but it wasn’t great. It floated and sailed though – and I was hooked! I got a job at a boatyard and learned how to do things right while repairing wooden and fiberglass boats – I did some other wooden boat projects and then got interested in composites. Mostly I wanted to work on faster and more modern boats.

Tagging along with a friend who was interviewing (like a normal human) I was offered a job at Goetz Custom Boats (RI, USA) where I was thrilled to finally work on racing boats. Imagine – a 60′ yacht made entirely from carbon fiber! It was exciting to get to learn from an experienced crew of boatbuilders and the pace was fast and the learning-curve steep. I messed up a lot and didn’t always listen, but learned fast and soon they were turning me (sort of) loose with plans to build small parts and install them.

I jumped around to some other shops building boats and components and learned as much as I could. It became clear to me that I needed to learn CAD, and soon after – that I needed a CNC router. These boats weren’t being lofted by hand on the floor anymore like I had done with my first wooden boats, but in the computer. Highly detailed 3D models defined almost everything, and people were hand building fewer pieces of tooling and machining more of them.

Once I got my hands on a CNC router (a Shopbot) I started doing cutting for other people between jobs and on the side. I saw how important the planning was and how you could either design parts and tooling to be easy to build, or you could seriously mess things up! I worked building two Volvo 70s (Puma) and for BMW Oracle Racing on the giant 90′ trimaran for the America’s Cup. Seeing how the best boatbuilders in the world did things was educational and working on high profile projects was exciting, but the lure of figuring things out for myself was still strong. When my wife was offered a job in a new place, we decided to move to where there were no racing boatbuilders nearby – where I would try starting my own shop.

I ran a small shop mostly by myself for several years. From the start, most of the work came through people I had worked with in the past – and mostly because I had a growing fleet of CNC machines and could design and deliver tooling fast and relatively cheap. I added an autoclave and a 5-axis router and started to grow out of my small space. It was fun to figure out everything by myself, but I really missed working as part of a larger team and the stress of managing all the aspects of a business didn’t really fit my one-track mind. I really just wanted to build stuff!

An opportunity came up to rent a larger space and join up with a friend and another guy I didn’t know who were running a shop doing more manufacturing-oriented composites work. I figured my CNC and process-design skills would mesh well with their experience with larger volume production. We were all very excited about the potential – the only downside was that our factory would be one and half hours from where I lived. No big deal, we’ll figure it out! I moved my equipment (now several CNC routers, ovens and an autoclave) to the new place and we set out trying to keep busy with paying work while figuring out how to combine three very different businesses. Over the next three years we struggled to nail down a formula that worked. We lost one partner before things really started and had lots of trouble building and maintaining a team.

Despite the struggles, we built dozens of beautiful parts, several short run production jobs and developed some neat processes for tooling and building complex parts. We shipped some stuff later than I’d have liked but customers kept coming back and we were never short on work – our big problem was finding, training and keeping members of our team. Several really great people worked with us, and I loved the process of pulling together to ship some excellent work to really demanding clients, some of whom I can’t (but would be proud to) name!

Nothing makes you want to learn like knowing you’re screwing up – and I started reading about and testing out strategies for better organization and management. Having worked in smallish “artisanal” or “non-profit” (racing team) shops, the world of manufacturing organization was fascinating. I tore through dozens of books on organizational strategies, management – Lean and Scrum – kanban and 5S. For somebody who had focused mostly on technology, it was amazing to see how absolutely critical good people and process management is to any organization. We had been focusing too much on the wrong part of the story. The more we learned, the more we realized that no matter how many nice parts we built, we had built the core of our business around tools and technology instead of around developing a team. We were running out of runway to figure things out and even though we were making money and staying super busy, it became less and less clear what “winning” as a job shop would really look like.

We decided to close up shop after three years – we did it slowly and carefully and everybody ended up in good places professionally and our families were happy to see us again. I started selling equipment and doing consulting/contracting and working on a few different new ideas. It was great to be home more and to be around for school drop-off and pick-up and to get a reasonable amount of sleep. But I missed making things and the go-go-go of getting up at 5AM and getting home at 9PM and the constant stream of problems to solve. Starting to write down things I have learned has really helped me stay engaged with my work. It feels right – and it’s fun – and I’m learning a ton! I’m not sure where the future will take me, but the last five years have taught me so much about people and community – and the value of sharing what we know and being eager to learn from others. It’s a win-win game!

-Chris – Sept. 2019.

Spring 2024 Update:

It’s been several years since I started writing this stuff down and EC! now has more sprawl and a YouTube channel. I have been pretty streaky with it – between work and a growing family it is something I try to work on but too often it’s the least pressing priority. I’ve worked for a yacht manufacturer doing manufacturing engineering and now for a company building undersea vehicles. It’s giving me a good look at how businesses work from the design and engineering office side of things, and I get to work with people who are really good at things I am bad at. I miss driving big CNC machines and email on Tuesdays – requests for quotes always seemed to come in hot on Tuesdays.

The journey is awesome, and it’s so much fun to have this EC! project to work on. I love the steady stream of emails and messages from people building interesting things all over the world. I love the challenge of learning new things and thinking about how to share them. Thank you for being part of it!