|
Drop by Drop
L ong before I joined the company, Glenair introduced its first hermetic product to the interconnect marketplace: a special-purpose hermetic receptacle called the GL400. Built for Westinghouse, the connector was used on the high-altitude surveillance aircraft AWACS. At that time, Glenair used an outside supplier to complete both the precision machining and glass firing. To say we were "new to the hermetic business" was an understatement. You could have counted the hermetic insert arrangements, coupling styles, material types and mounting configurations we offered all on one hand. As you can see from this long-awaited issue of QwikConnect (about time, boys) we have come a long way since that first AWACS application. Today we offer circular and rectangular hermetic connectors in a broad range of contact densities—from the Micro-D to the 5015. We handle all the popular materials now as well, including Kovar®, stainless steel and titanium. We're mil-qualified on D38999 Series I, II, III and IV hermetics, and we're busy qualifying the MIL-C-24308/9 D-Subminiature series. We support hundreds of insert arrangements, and many popular coupling styles—threaded, bayonet, double-start, and push-pull. Our hermetic production capacity has grown as well, with both in-house firing, new precision machining centers and lots of new tooling. Not bad for a backshell company. As the GL400 should illustrate, we've built our hermetic capability in direct response to customer requirements; be it technical innovation or just better price and delivery. Obviously, we have accomplished this work over many years: As is generally our want, we have grown our hermetic business at a slow, steady (some might say glacial) pace.
Going forward, Glenair is committed to servicing our hermetic connector
customers with an ever expanding array of high-quality and high-performance
interconnect solutions. In fact, that steady dripping sound you
may hear on Air Way is not condensation forming inside a pressure chamber.
Rather, it¡¦s the relentless, drip, drip, drip of our growing presence in the
hermetic marketplace. And we are far from finished. This year, we're qualifying
our socket-gender contact receptacles for MIL-DTL-38999 Series I and
III, and introducing hermetic connectors across the board in our expanded
Series 80 "Mighty Mouse" product family. We're also adding new hermetic
part numbers to our Same-Day Inventory Program, including several new
Micro-D's and accelerating the pace of our tooling and equipment acquisitions—Drop-by-drop.
|
| Glenair QwikConnect Navigator | ||
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
