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California-Based Medical Device Maker Plans Colorado Springs, Colo., Plant

Posted on: Monday, 24 April 2006, 15:00 CDT

By Sarah Colwell, The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo.

Apr. 21--Bal Seal Engineering, a California-based medical device maker, announced said Thursday that it will open a manufacturing facility in Colorado Springs.

The company plans eventually to hire more than 100 employees and build its own 50,000-square-foot plant near the Colorado Springs Airport in 2008.

For now it will lease a 15,000-square-foot space on Elkton Drive in the Garden of the Gods Road corridor and hire about 20 employees to get started.

Jacques Naviaux, vice chairman of Bal Seal, said the size of the Colorado Springs community and the quality of the local work force were the reason Bal Seal chose the Springs over Denver or Fort Collins, which it also considered.

"If you go to a smaller community you will be a bigger part of the community, and that is very important to us as we go forward," Naviaux said. "And we thought the work force here better suited our requirements. ... The whole move was predicated on being a able to recruit locally."

The bulk of the company's hires will be micro machinists, whose salaries will range from $20 to $40 an hour; assemblers, who will be paid $10 to $15 an hour; and quality inspectors, who will receive between $16 and $20 an hour. The company also will hire plant managers and other administrative staff.

Bal Seal manufactures custom engineered coiled springs that are welded into rings and are used for sealing, electrical transfers and grounding, and mechanical holding, latching and loading.

The rings can be made in any size. The smallest rings are 2,000ths of an inch in diameter -- which is half the thickness of a piece of paper, and so small engineers must use a microscope to weld it together.

"We have a real obsession with springs," Naviaux said. "So Colorado Springs might be a good fit for us."

The company's rings have a variety of uses, including pacemakers, surgical lasers, hydraulics at oil and gas refineries, high-voltage connectors in transmissions, supercomputer contacts, gas pump safety connectors and braking systems on aircraft. They help keep planes in the air, enable deep-sea exploration for oil and gas, and enhance medical and scientific developments, the company says.

Bal Seal customers include NASA, Sorin Biomedica, Tyco Electronics Corp., St. Jude, Medtronic, Boston Scientific and Johnson & Johnson.

The Colorado Springs facility will manufacture components for inner-ear implants, pacemakers, defibrillators, drug delivery systems and neurostimulators that can be used to treat the pain of Parkinson's patients. Right now the company makes about 3,000 contact seals a week. With the new Springs facility, the company expects to make 9,000 seals a week within two years.

"The most rapidly growing part of our business is going to come here," Naviaux said.

Although many manufacturers are going overseas to capitalize on an inexpensive labor force, Naviaux said it was never an option for Bal Seal to take its facility outside the United States.

"We didn't consider it for a micro-second. Our business is based on trade secrets, and if we take that overseas it will be gone, and we can never get it back," Naviaux said.

The Greater Colorado Springs Economic Development Corp. worked to bring the company to the Springs.

"Medical-related technology is a highly desirable industry to have in any community," said Mike Kazmierski, president and chief executive officer of the EDC. "Bal Seal Engineering's arrival will boost this important and expanding sector of our local economy."

The company develops and manufactures its own equipment and materials used to make the coil springs.

Bal Seal ishas headquartereds in Foothill Ranch, Calif., where it employs 450. It also has 15 employees at a facility in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

It was founded in 1958 and holds more than 420 U.S. and foreign patents.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Gazette, Colorado Springs, Colo.

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Source: The Gazette

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