San Diego Composites moves to new headquarters, delivers gimbal structure

San Diego Composites Inc. (SDC, San Diego, Calif., USA) reports that it has moved into its new headquarters, a 70,000 ft²/6,503m² state-of-the-art production facility, doubling its previous square footage. "This new facility greatly expands the capabilities of SDC to work large-scale production programs and large-scale hardware for the aerospace, defense and composites community," says SDC president, Robert Kolozs.

Features include:

• 37,000-ft² production space
• 6,300-ft² cleanrooms
• 6,000-ft² machine shop
• 1,800 ft² of testing equipment
• 10,000-ft² engineering office space
• 1,500-ft² conference center

SDC's facilities focus on the production of hardware for missiles, canisters space structures and aircraft.

SDC also reports that it has delivered a Composite Gimbal Structure for an optical design customer. The Composite Gimbal Structure is one of three unique parts SDC produced for this stable structure platform. SDC designed and manufactured a multi-piece tool to achieve the trapped geometry features of the Composite Gimbal Structure. SDC then its all-digital composites manufacturing process, known as HD Composites, to produce the high-quality hardware. SDC's HD Composites process uses state-of-the-art CAD software for digital ply pattern generation, automated CNC ply cutting, digital laser projection for precise ply placement, automated CNC machining, and digital laser final inspection for quality assurance. SDC's HD Composites process eliminates human handoffs and opportunities for error to significantly reduce production time and lower scrap rate for the highest quality and lowest cost composite hardware.