The Electronic Pygmy

In the auto industry, one of the biggest problems is the long lead time needed to bring out new models. Because it takes at least 15 months to make the tools and dies needed for a new car, the designer must decide what the public is going to want nearly two years before the car actually comes out. For this reason designers often get caught with their plans down; there was little they could do about the revolt against chrome--and the demand for a small car. Last week General Motors and Ford were experimenting with a radical new electronic machine to make dies that would drastically cut the lead time, make it possible to turn out dies in as short a time as six months.

The automakers, who will make up their minds on the new process in the next two months, have privately indicated they will adopt it. If they do, they will be able to keep right up with changing consumer taste.

The machine that is causing all the excitement among the giants is put out by the pygmy-sized (104 employees) Elox Corp. of Royal Oak, Mich. It will bring, said a Ford tool expert, not only a change in carmaking but a "quiet revolution in the metal workings trades." Elox (for "electrical oxidation") machines not only make the machining of metal faster and cheaper, but they enable U.S. industry to do jobs it has never done before. Said Jerry Cornwell, purchasing agent for Avco's Lycoming Division, a prime missile contractor: "We're doing things that just couldn't be done without Elox equipment."

The Electric Way. Traditionally, dies and similar metal products have been made by the slow process of grinding away the metal to fit a pattern. Using the Elox method, a die shape can be formed first in wood or plaster, then sprayed with a soft metal. When the metal hardens, it is used as an electrode, i.e., conducts the electric current. When the electrode is placed close to a piece of metal and the current applied, the metal is vaporized to the same shape as the electrode pattern. With this process the hardest metals have been shaped as easily as cast iron, and the machines are automatic, e.g., one ran unattended for 72 hours while it shaped a high-speed rotor for the Argonne atomic laboratory.

While the principles of electrical-discharge machining are not new, many of the developments of Elox are. The company was founded during World War II, but was doing badly until John S. Larkins, 40, an Iowa State graduate engineer, took over. He had become interested after he purchased one of the machines for a business he was running, began buying the company patents with $5,000 in 1950. At the time, Elox machines were being used only to salvage engine blocks, and similar parts. The process was too crude to be used in other machine work, so Larkins worked to develop the process, refined it to the point where he could machine metals to millionths of an inch in accuracy.

Up from the Alley. By plowing back money into research. Elox has grown from a back-alley business with sales of $194,563 in 1951 to a gross of $2,260,000 last year and earnings of $158,874. With a 90-day backlog of orders, the company expects to boost both gross and net in its current fiscal year.

The secret of Elox's success is its complicated electronic controls (using hundreds of condenser tubes) and its ability to tackle new projects. Larkins has kept the company small and flexible by making only the controls, subcontracting the work of making the machines to other companies. Some sell for as little as $8,500, range as high as $200,000. Larkins is constantly taking on new jobs. When the Portland (Me.) Copper & Tank Works needed a machine that would rapidly drill 160 evenly spaced holes in different parts, yet assure their exact alignment in the afterburner of a General Electric J-79 jet engine, the company called on Elox. They worked out a machine, an eight-headed monster that can quickly and automatically drill dozens of combinations of holes. Said Engineer Clifford B. Smith of Portland Copper & Tank: "Elox's limits are only the limits of an engineer's imagination."

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