Master Craft Extrusion Tools on 771 Mill St. in Northport, owned by Don Allington, has a unique specialty: tools and dies for aluminum and brass extrusion. In laymen’s terms, they create machines that compress these metals into various shapes, including pipes, mandrels, and other tools.
As a producer of aluminum and brass extrusion dies and tools, Master Craft caters to a niche and highly competitive industry. Ordinarily, these kinds of dies extrude steel. Their list of customers includes some of the largest producers of aluminum in the world like Alcoa, Norsk Hydro, and Kaiser Aluminum.
But Master Craft’s highest profile client was NASA. Back in the 1990s, Master Craft produced its largest aluminum extrusion die – the largest die of this kind ever made, as far as Allington knows – to fabricate the exterior fuel cells for space shuttles. The unit produced pipes 33 inches in diameter and about 40 feet in length, which were cut up and added to other pipes to assemble the cells.
Unlike other dies, which ordinarily extrude steel, this die extruded aluminum pipes. Aluminum is significantly lighter and less dense than steel, which was expected to greatly reduce the weight of space shuttles using them. When the Leelanau Enterprise reported on the project in February 1992, Allington said they expected to cut the structural weight of spacecraft by 4,000-7,000 pounds.
Master Craft assembled this die in late 1991 and delivered it to the space center in Houston for experimentation and testing. Allington recalls sitting alongside observant NASA scientists and staff in military uniforms to watch the die in action in a Texas warehouse.
Although the die cast the lighter aluminum tubes successfully, Master Craft lost the contract with NASA to another firm. Despite this, Allington remembers the experience fondly. The meeting room at Master Craft’s office in Northport is still adorned with memorabilia from this project, including a 32-inch aluminum extrusion cross section, and a photo of a shuttle using these kind of fuel cells.
Don Allington learned the trade under his father, Lee Allington, who started the family business in 1958, and operated the Alka Tool and Die Plant that opened in Suttons Bay in the 1970s. Don and his wife Diane Allington founded Master Craft in Suttons Bay in 1982 and moved to their current location in Northport in 1984.
When asked how the industry has changed over these 40 years, Don Allington said that the practices of extrusion remain much the same today as when he studied under his father. Although the tools may be more precise and computer-aided design may be more common, at the end of the day it’s still good, old-fashioned metallurgy.
