Youngstown-built tech trailer headed to naval base

By GRAIG GRAZIOSI

ggraziosi@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

A $150,000 trailer full of Youngstown-built technology will hit the road Thursday to begin a journey to the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in New Orleans.

The Transportable Digital Fabrication Lab is one of four 34-foot mobile additive manufacturing units created for the government by Youngstown Business Incubator portfolio company Applied Systems and Technology Transfer.

The trailer is filled with manufacturing technologies and learning resources: two 3-D printers, a laser engraver, a pair of routers for electronic circuit and component fabrication, a milling station, a digital design lab, and learning space featuring laptops, monitors and whiteboards.

The machines inside the trailer can be powered by generator or by energy hookups, and have been bolted to the frame of the trailer to prevent any transportation-related accidents.

Nick Mazurek, the head of engineering, design and development at AST2 and a 2016 graduate of Youngstown State University, said the trailer was an all-in-one design and fabrication station.

“Everything in here is networked. People using the lab can pull out the laptops in the unit and hook them up to monitors to start designing what they need to produce, and they can even project their work to the large central monitor if they’re teaching a class or trying to share the design with the room,” Mazurek said. “Once they have their design, they can send it to any of the machines in the unit and move directly into production.”

The FabLab, as it’s colloquially known, can be used as a mobile training center to give students hands-on experience with the technology or as a mobile manufacturing center to assist military maintenance battalions on deployment.

AST2 is specifically a government contractor, and the FabLabs were built to fulfill a contract with the Department of Defense for use by the Naval Air Systems Command, a materiel production arm of the Navy.

Though less than a decade old, AST2 – formerly part of Advanced Methods and Innovations, another YBI portfolio company that split to focus on specific markets – has already made significant contributions to the Navy.

In 2014, a 3-D printer developed by Advanced Methods and Innovations – the Invent3D – became the first printer of its kind to be used on ships in the Navy’s fleet.

Last year, Mazurek and Gug Sresty, the president of AST2, traveled to Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton to train Marine machinists on additive manufacturing and engraving machines similar to those installed in the trailer.