3DP and the DIB

Steve Melito: Hey everybody, welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now. The podcast that’s powered by FuzeHub. I’m your host, Steve Melito. Today we’re talking to Mike Mowins, president and owner of Vetted Tech Incorporated. Vetted Tech is a service-disabled, veteran-owned small business that specializes in the additive manufacturing of metal and polymer components for the medical, automotive, defense, energy and aerospace industries. Mike, welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now.

Mike Mowins: Steve, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. We’re actually located in Syracuse on Court Street Road.

Steve Melito: You are Okay. I’m glad that you mentioned that, so you’re in the heart of it all now.

Mike Mowins: Yes, we are right across the corner from Carrier and not far from Lockheed Martin and Saab.

Steve Melito: Excellent, excellent. So, Mike, you’ve had a very accomplished career. I’ll admit. I went on a LinkedIn and tried to learn about you some more, and you graduated from the US Naval Academy, earned an MBA and were the president of global licensing at Phillips Screw Company for almost 30 years. So, Mike, what made you want to start your own business?

Mike Mowins: Well, I really came to the decision to start my own business for two real reasons. One, I’d worked for Phillips Screw for 31 years and been their employee, ran the whole company for 31 years and been their employee, ran the whole company. But we had owners that did things behind the scenes. You know I ran a couple of acquisitions, did a couple of things there, but I did want to be able to go out and start my own business on my own terms. And the other thing that was really driving my desire to start the business was having a way to give back to the veteran community. I was a graduate of the Naval Academy. I never got to serve because I was NPQ at graduation, not physically qualified. I had a service disability at my graduation. So I was discharged at graduation, got my degree and was able to go on to get my MBA out of URI. But it was a way for me to give back to all of those who serve our country on a day-in, day-out basis. One, by employing an all-veteran staff and two, by focusing the work that we do here at Vetted Tech on our rural fighters and supporting the DOD and the United States overall.

Steve Melito: Excellent. So additive manufacturing, or 3D printing as it’s more often called, covers a wide range of technologies and materials, which ones does Vetted Tech specialize in?

Mike Mowins: You know that range of materials and those range of processes is growing every day. We’re seeing new and innovative ways to do additive manufacturing spring up all over, from electron beam additive manufacturing to new resin-based polymer systems, as well as what we’re seeing out of a company that we’re working with in Rochester called CBAM in their new carbon fiber reinforced takeoff from an old Xerox technology with inkjet Very interesting. We’re looking forward to working with them on some great new projects. But right now we specialize in additive manufacturing in metals utilizing direct metal laser sintering. So we’ve got a big container of powder that’s swept across the top of our build plate in very thin 40 micron layers. Our razor comes in, fuses that together in the shape of the part that we’re building and then comes in and scrapes another layer over in 40 microns and fuses that next layer. So we’re able to build very intricate, near net shaped metal parts in stainless steels and nickel alloys. But we also do what’s called fusion deposition modeling, which is essentially taking a fishing line, melting it and creating a form by squirting it out in the right shape. We utilize Markforged Systems here with our onyx and carbon fiber-reinforced onyx in a number of different ways, as well as being able to print nylon and several other types of plastics, building, useful parts for drones, fixtures, tooling all sorts of different applications. Our work in the metal area is very specialized and we have a lot of great customers there as well.

Steve Melito: Good. Now you mentioned the term micron. Is that, if I recall correctly, about one one-thousandth the size of a human hair? Is it that small?

Mike Mowins: It’s very, very thin. Yes, you’re right. You’re right in the neighborhood.

Steve Melito: Okay, good. So, Mike, do 3D printed metal parts have the same properties as the ones that are produced with subtractive manufacturing methods like CNC?

Mike Mowins: No, well, you know, in many cases we have as good and sometimes often much better properties, especially in some of the areas we’re looking at growing our business. We’ve been approached by Austal, which is in the submarine industrial base, and they’ve asked us to join their supply chain and one of the things they’re looking to us to do is to create parts for them in copper nickel, and the problem that the submarine industrial base has right now with copper nickel is that the castings that they’re buying for copper nickel parts have about a 50% failure rate because of high porosity. With additive manufacturing we’re running 99% capability with good parts almost all the time. So we are looking at parts that come off our build plate right now in our stainless steel and nickel alloys that are as good as a cast part, and if we do a process called hot isostatic press or HIP, then they’re as good as a forged part and sometimes often better.

Steve Melito: Wow, so you mentioned earlier you do some work for the government and some of your government customers are the US Army Department of Energy. Can you tell us about the parts you make for them, and are they for prototyping production or maybe both?

Mike Mowins: We do parts in both different areas for the DOE and the DOD. We have been approached. We were approached very early in starting the company by US Department of Energy’s Morgantown National Lab and they came to us and said okay, we need to build this in 316 stainless steel. It was our first great challenge. It was a contract we had with USDOE. We made some very intricate, tall parts with very thin walls and then we made what’s called a pintle and that is the center of a combustion that USDOE builds down in Morgantown and we built it probably seven or eight times over the last five years for them in a range of different materials, starting out in 316L stainless steel and making it the last time around for them in nickel alloy 718. But beyond that we’ve done trial parts and fixtures for National Surface Weapons Center, carderock, for their fatigue testing area. We do carbon fiber reinforced parts for a number of different applications within the DOD. And then we also do work with Naval Nuclear Laboratories which are all around us here in upstate New York. We’ve got the Schenectady facility, the Niskayuna facility, the Bettis lab out in Pennsylvania. So we’ve become a key supplier to a lot of their opportunities as well as supplying, you know some of our space opportunities with Blue Origin and other areas. So yeah, we’ve we see an awful lot with Sandia National Labs as well. We’ve done quite a bit for them.

Steve Melito: Good and do you do some work for non-government customers as well? Can you tell us about some of those projects and how they find you?

Mike Mowins: Absolutely. You know the customers find us in a number of different ways. Some of them approach us directly and some of us approach us through Xometry. Xometry is a nationwide clearinghouse for CNC work and additive manufacturing and we’ve worked with Xometry since 2020, and we’ve won their Manufacturing Excellence Award for the last four years. In fact, we just got our award for 2024, where we have a 100% on time, 100% quality rating with them right now. So we’ve been very fortunate to be the go-to for Xometry on anything that’s stainless steel 316, 17-4, and the nickel alloys 625 and 718. We’ve done everything for them, from making tailpipe holders for GM Racing out of high-performance nickel alloys to building parts for Blue Origin and some other key customers. We also get approached by standard industrial customers that come to us and say, hey, we’ve got an idea, we want to do this. We’re just finishing up a production run. As you heard earlier, my shop is busy, so you’re hearing a little background from them finishing up a production run. As you heard earlier, my shop is busy, so you’re hearing a little background from them. Good, they’re finishing out an order we have with TE Connectivity down in Pennsylvania building Very small, very intricate stainless steel parts that go into connectors and various probes that they do.

Steve Melito: Okay, good. Now part of what makes VETATEC different from other companies that offer 3D printing services is that you’re AS9100 and ISO 9001 2015 certified. Yes, Can you tell us how you earned those certifications and the role that the New York Manufacturing Extension Partnership played?

Mike Mowins: Certainly you know, I came out of a 31-year career at the Phillips Screw Company and I managed 140 different companies around the world, did a lot of work in the aerospace industry, was actually the small business representative on the Aerospace Industries Association Supplier Management Council. In the last three or four years I was at Phillips Screw so I was very familiar with what the aerospace industry was looking for. They’d come to me and asked if I’d make 3D printed parts for the things that we were doing with Phillips Screw. So I knew that that industry was going to be a key industry for me when I looked at additive manufacturing and starting that up as an organization, and I knew that AS9100 and my ISO 9001 were going to not only be fairly good barriers to entry by other players in this market but give us a step up versus all of our other competitors in the market if we were there first and best. And so I went out to TDO, which is our local MEP representative. Jim D’Agostino and the team over there are just absolutely fabulous. We were down in Washington DC with them about two weeks ago as their kind of poster child for what you can actually do when you partner up with an MEP, and they came in. Jim came in even before we opened the doors, walked through our facility with us and said, okay, here’s how we’re going to help you set up your shop, because we knew what machines we were going to get in, we knew how much space they took and we kind of mapped out the product flow from powder coming through the door, getting inspected, going into the backside of their facility here, going into our machines, making sure that our machines were running tight, and then going from our machines into the post-process area which is on another side of a wall to separate those two different variables. And then they actually came in and helped us write most of our quality manual. You know I’d been inspecting and looking at ISO manuals. So I knew ISO 9001. I knew AS9100. But the team at TDO, Sarah Burlingame over there, came in and helped us walk through each of those various steps, making sure that we tailored our manuals directly to our processes and directly to what we were doing.

And I’ve got to say that has really been a tremendous benefit for us because in the four years that we’ve been AS9100 certified we’ve had count them one minor finding on all of our audits and that was just. It was on our last audit and it was kind of crazy because the auditor came in, couldn’t find anything really wrong with our systems and what we were doing and he said you know, you didn’t take into account this bulletin that came out in August. We got looked at in September. That said you need to have a risk assessment for the impact of climate change in your risk assessment in your AS9100. I was like are you kidding me? He had to find something and that’s what he found. Yes, indeed, we’ve been just partnered up with TDO and the FuzeHub MEP. We partnered up with FuzeHub statewide and we’re at the Aerospace Conference in Canada as part of their project a number of years ago. We’ve worked with FuzeHub at the Innovation Summit. I mean, it’s just been a tremendous boon to what we try and do here at Vetted Tech.

Steve Melito: Oh great, and many thanks for going down to Washington DC last week for what they call Hill Day, and that’s when the Manufacturing Extension Partnership Nationwide talks to Congress, and it’s important for them to hear from manufacturers like yourself as well.

Mike Mowins: PDO and what the whole MEP system is done for us. The other thing I didn’t touch on is we partnered up with Mohawk Valley Community College and Corey Albrecht and his team out there. John Laporte was very early in our process of going towards CMMC that we want to talk about as well. But the opportunity I had to go down to DC was really timely because we were able to go down and promote the MEP partnership. But also talking about an appropriation that we are requesting through our Congress and Senate representatives for the next Mantec bill to support our warfighters even further and upgrade our shop here as well as duplicate our shop in the Far East.

Steve Melito: Good yeah, so let’s shift gears and talk about cybersecurity a bit. Your company has implemented NIST 800-171 cybersecurity protocols and is moving from CMMC-1 to CMMC-2. Why did you earn those certifications when so many other manufacturers are either wondering what the heck I’m talking about or are waiting to go after them?

Mike Mowins: When I was working at Shut Up Screw, as I said, I was the small business liaison to the Aerospace Industries Association and as part of that, I was one of the original interviewees with the DOD and the government to be asked okay, we’re going to implement cybersecurity, how do we create this and what are the swim lanes we need to be in? Now that goes all the way back into the mid 2000s, late 2000s, early 2020, early 2010s, and we actually developed the swim lanes for how you do CMMC, If you’re a manufacturer, if you’re a service bureau, if you’re doing this, if you’re doing that and so I knew it was coming. I knew it was going to be a critical part of any work we wanted to do that was going to support DOE, DOD and any of the government type of customers, and so I started very early on. When Corey Albrecht and the team over at Mohawk Valley and CCM over there started their program, I was one of the first applicants for their CMMC training program under the first round tranche of grants over there, and so we had their auditor associate company up in Watertown area come in, go through our first assessment with us. We looked at what we found and said, okay, how do we do this? And as I worked through our implementation, I knew that we didn’t want to have a very wide network because we’re a small company and we want to keep it that way to an extent. But we also want to keep a very tight lid on all of the CUI and levels above that CUI that come in and out of our company here. And we’re ITAR registered, so we’re registered into the Joint Certification Program as well. JCP in-portal, out-portal that we could control very tightly and create. That enclave where all of our CUI resided never got out into the outside world. We have internal virtual networks as opposed to one large network for the company. If you come in as a guest. It’s a very separate network within our organization from our internal organizations and almost all of our machines are hardwired so it never goes out over an open network anywhere with what we’re doing in CUI. So, CMMC, we knew it was coming. We knew it was going to be a critical stepping stone going to maintain all of our DoD business and so we got into that process very early and because I had a background in it with what I did with AIA earlier, I was able to move us along that path very quickly.

Steve Melito: Good so, Mike, one last question for you how can potential Vetted Tech customers reach you to talk about parts and projects?

Mike Mowins: Well, we’ve got a pretty active website and you can actually log into our website. We’ve got a customer portal there. All you have to do is go into the inquiry part of our portal and say I’ve got this, can you help me? But they can also call us or reach out to us via our email at any time as well. You know I get emails and inquiries coming in and out through our web portal on a regular basis, but they can also reach out to us through the local MEP, Jim D’Agostino, over at TDO. You know if he’s got another company that he’s working with that he finds needs what we do. He’s a great go-between, a great way to connect us up, and we do that with Corey Albrecht, we do that with Everton and Rika is out at FuzeHub. Overall, we work with Elena on a regular basis. It was great to go down to DC. We had a couple of customers come back through that as well. So really, by our website, our website wwww.vetted3d.com, or direct to me, m Mullins at Vetted3D.com, or inquiry at Vetted3D.com Any of those emails will get to us and get the whole process started on how we make your parts for you.

Steve Melito: Fantastic, Mike. Thanks so much for being part of New York State Manufacturing Now.

Mike Mowins: Steve, we are excited. The partnership with MEP FuzeHub TDO, Corey Albrecht and his team, john Laporte, on the CMMC side has just been a true boon to our organization here and we look forward to many more years of working with the group there.

Steve Melito: I’d love to hear, and thanks for your support of the whole MEP network. It’s really critical.

Mike Mowins: Well, their support to us is critical as well, and we truly appreciate it.

Steve Melito: Fantastic. So we’ve been talking to Mike Mowins, President and owner of Vetted Tech Incorporated in Syracuse, New York. Two of the topics that we’ve discussed today additive manufacturing and cybersecurity are important parts of some upcoming FuzeHub events. The first is our Spring 2025 Finger Lakes Cybersecurity Event in Rochester, that’s on April 17th. The second is a Rapid Tooling Workshop, also in Rochester, on July 16th. You can learn more about both events by Googling the FuzeHub Events calendar list, and I’d encourage you to sign up for the cybersecurity event soon, while space is still available. And if you missed any of that, don’t worry. Just email info at FuzeHub.com and we’ll get you the information that you need. So, on behalf of FuzeHub and New York State Manufacturing Now, this is Steve Melito signing off.