MILFORD – When it comes to tradition, Hitchiner Manufacturing looks two ways at once: to the deep past – you can’t get much deeper than ancient Egypt – and to the tech-heavy future, as in counter-gravity casting, robots and computer-aided design.

Both of these viewpoints remain in the forefront as the company moves into the 42,000-square-foot, multimillion-dollar expansion of its Milford headquarters, where intricate metal parts for jet engines are made using modern variations of the ancient method of lost-wax casting.

“This is a process that you wouldn’t want to do if there was any other way to accomplish what it does,” CEO John Morison III said during a recent tour of the facility.

But as you would suspect in a process with some 3,000 years of history – lost-wax casting was done by ancient Egyptians, by the Aztecs and in the west African land known as Benin, among many places – no good alternatives have been developed.

Companies such as Hitchiner still begin with a metal die that outlines the shape of the component to be made, although these days, that die is designed on computer and sometimes made by one.

Workers fill the die space with wax, then remove the die and coat the wax shape in 10 layers of slurry and sand to create a hard, heat-resistant ceramic shell.

They melt the wax away to leave a ceramic shell around a void, pour molten metal into the void, then let it cool and finally break away the ceramic, leaving the desired part.

“You go from a negative to a positive to a negative to a positive again,” Morison said.

It’s a convoluted process that Hitchiner’s two Milford facilities – the headquarters with its vacuum-casting operation on 13 acres on Route 101A (Elm Street) and the ferrous-casting operation on nearby Savage Road – perform thousands of times a week. They fill orders for customers from Rolls-Royce’s jet engine division to General Motors to firms that make replacement knees.

Hitchiner moved to Milford in 1951, a few years after it started in Manchester. Now it does roughly $100 million worth of annual business in New Hampshire, including a factory in Littleton. It also has two operations in Mexico that make parts mostly for the automotive industry.

It has 343 employees in Milford, working two shifts, and a total of 723 in New Hampshire. Globally, it has about 2,000 employees. As one of the largest manufacturing employers in the state, its viewpoint is global.

Hitchiner competes with companies stretching from China to France, and has a supply chain that goes as far as west as Australia, where most of the nickle/cobalt alloy used in jet-engine parts is mined.

Not bad for a family-owned company that was started and run by Morison’s grandfather and father. But even a successful firm can’t stand still; hence, the expansion.

Hitchiner started planning the project in 2010 and it will be finished in about 2013, Morison said. From the outside, the $7 million construction project looks nearly finished, but inside, there’s still a lot to do.

Hitchiner is in the happy state of being able to pay for the project, which with moving and other costs will total about $14 million, itself; no extra debt was taken on.

The company first tore down about 5,000 square feet attached to its main building, then built the 42,000-square-foot addition.

It has moved the first step of manufacturing – the wax-injection operation – into the new clean-manufacturing space, and will soon move in the next step, making the ceramic shells.

That move will also allow more automation for one of the messier parts of the process, which involves taking “trees” holding up to 200 wax molds of industrial parts and dunking them up to 10 times into huge vats of slurry or sand.

Office functions from the old building, as well as some that existed in other buildings, have been moved into the new space, consolidating U.S. management in a single location for the first time in decades, Morison said.

These moves will allow the existing building to be refurbished so that manufacturing operations can be rearranged and expanded to meet continued growth.

That growth hit the skids in 2008 when the recession clobbered the automotive industry, but is again on track, Morison said. The Elm Street operation, the gas turbine division, had 2005 sales of about $40 million and 2012 sales are expected to be about $65 million, an increase of almost two-thirds.

That’s a lot of output, since the average piece, whether part of a prosthesis, part of a car turbocharger unit or a numbingly complex component for a jet engine, costs about $150.

One key to Hitchiner’s success, the company says, is its invention and development of a system that uses vacuum pressure to draw molten metal alloys into the ceramic molds rather than just pouring the metal in. The company says this creates a better result, with fewer flaws and less waste.

This is “state of the art for the industry,” Morison said, but it isn’t cheap. Each of the four huge furnaces costs $1 million to $2.5 million.

Big capital costs don’t stop there; this isn’t an industry for shallow pockets. Before going into the furnace, ceramic molds must be preheated to between 1,700 and 1,900 degrees in one of several massive ovens, each the size of a walk-in freezer.

“You can tell the difference between 1,700 and 1,900 degrees. They feel different; 1,900 is really hot,” Morison said in a bit of understatement as he watched visitors step back from waves of heat as the furnace doors rolled open.

The furnaces where molten alloys are poured are much hotter, up to 2,600 degrees.

The actual temperatures are carefully controlled as part of the complex dance needed to produce parts where every dimension must be accurate to within a few thousandths of an inch, even though different materials shrink and grow differently in response to similar conditions.

That’s part of the chemistry and physics that must be mastered to create the metal bits that create the machines that make the modern world work.

After coming out of the furnace and having the ceramic mold removed – a chemistry lesson in itself that can involve caustic soda baths – pieces are examined for quality under black light after going through a fluoride bath, and then under X-ray to spot any internal flaws.

Developing and refining such techniques is the job of Metal Casting Technology, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitchiner, known locally as the building next to the fountain with a tall, abstract sculpture alongside the Route 101 bypass. MCT is designed to give Hitchiner an edge in a mature business, although generating income from patent licenses wouldn’t be frowned on, either.

Down the road, Hitchiner has acres of empty property at its main campus where future expansion is possible, Morison said.

The facility has expanded, with buildings added or enlarged, and sometimes torn down, several times over the decades. With any luck, the current work won’t be the last.

“Oh, we’re definitely here to stay,” Morison said.

David Brooks can be reached at 594-6531 or dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com.