To all of our valued customers,

This letter is a bit long, so for those of you tight on time, here is a quick synopsis:

• Allied Titanium is now both ISO-9001 and AS9100D certified for the manufacturing and DESIGN of titanium products.

• Bob Bishop is our new Quality Manager, and as such, a key member of the Allied Titanium management team.

• Our United States Northwest factory is now functional with our Tough-Ti™ process in production.

For thirty years, Bob has made a career for himself by leading companies through the labyrinths of aerospace quality certifications. As an AS9100D certified auditor, he has seen the good, the bad and the ugly of every imaginable company and getting anybody through the certification process is no small feat. Those of you familiar with AS9100D know what I’m talking about.

For those who are unfamiliar with this standard, AS9100D looks at every aspect of a company’s ability to reliably provide products and services to the aerospace, defense and space industries. The last thing a rocket company needs is a missed launch date due to a company they ordered parts from going out of business. This is why the certification auditors don’t just look at the manufacturing and inspection processes, but also on time performance, data backups, purchasing procedures, training and anything else one could imagine that may affect a business’ viability.

Design is a big deal for us. When we founded Allied in 2007, we assumed that there would be design standards for titanium products in the same fashion that there is for steel and stainless-steel. We were shocked to discover that outside the aerospace industry, there are none. This meant that in order to become a titanium manufacturer, we had to design our own products, a monumental task due to the fact that titanium’s properties are so different then the other metals. We now have over 100,000 products offered, most of which are our own designs.

The AS9100D standard is really strict when it comes to design certification, so getting this was quite the effort. As far as we know, we are the only titanium manufacturer in North America that is also an AS9100D certified design house for titanium. As you can imagine, the entire certification process was a significant investment.

In the past, when someone needed Mechanical and Chemical Certs or CoC’s (Certificates of Conformance) on a product, we provided them free of charge, spreading the cost of doing this among all of our customers. Going forward, we will be offering products with certs and CoC’s at an increased cost, while the cost of our “industrial” products will go down. After a lot of discussion, we feel this is only fair. Of course, everything we manufacture will be done under both the ISO-9001 and AS9100D standards.

Many of you are starting to see the results of our Tough-Ti™ project. While some believe that titanium is very hard, it is actually quite soft and whacking regular old Grade 2 or 5 titanium with a stainless steel butter knife will dent it. This means that titanium hex bolts and nuts have flats that are a bit on the soft side This lends them to rounding off during wrenching. We have addressed this problem by inventing a process we call Tough-Ti™ that causes the flat to become extremely hard and durable. Tough-Ti™ is not a coating, but an alteration of the titanium itself to a depth of a little over 0.005 of an inch. The process works on any grade of titanium. Of course, we aren’t going to reveal the process itself, but I will say that it is easy to test. Just take a sharp pocketknife and try to scratch a Tough-Ti™surface.

Finally, I really want to sincerely thank all of you who have supported us in the building of our Northwest Titanium Factory in Sequim, WA. It has been a monumental undertaking. I am so delighted to see you benefitting from titanium products manufactured on American soil.

Thank you so much for your business,

Christopher Greimes
CEO
Allied Titanium, Inc.

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Past CEO Letters:

CEO Letter #1

CEO Letter #2