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Center for Rapid Product Realization

WCU expertise and laboratories help bridge the academy and the economy

Danny Heatherly shows off his artificial poplar siding

The next time you see distinctive wood siding on a building, think about entrepreneur Danny Heatherly (pictured above) and his link with Western Carolina. Heatherly harvests strips of bark from tulip poplar trees for drying in the kilns of his Canton-based company, Timberclad. The flat, dried bark makes fine siding, but is expensive to produce one tree at a time. That’s why Heatherly came to WCU’s Center for Rapid Product Realization to develop comparable cladding from lower cost, artificial materials.

“We scanned the tree bark and replicated every detail,” said Phil Sanger, director of the Rapid Center in WCU’s Kimmel School of Construction Management and Technology. The problem is the result was too exact. “Our rapid prototyping equipment is so precise that it had difficulty with all the details. We backed off a bit, created a sample in plastic, and then spray-painted it to simulate the colors of real tree bark,” Sanger said.

Heatherly was delighted. “I was tickled to work with them,” he said. Now he has a Wisconsin company using the mold created at WCU to cast his new product out of recycled plastic. Heatherly calls it EcoBark. “Once I get this thing on the market, it’s going to go worldwide,” he predicted, “and we can say it was developed right here in Western North Carolina.” Heatherly knows he’s taking a risk launching a new product during an economic downturn. “I’m going to push forward ’til I get it done,” he said.

Assisting a determined entrepreneur is just one example of the Rapid Center’s work. It also worked with Hickory-based US Conec to design prototypes for connectors that link fibers smaller than the width of a human hair; helped Morganton’s Elk Products, a major U.S. manufacturer of home-security systems, test a complex part without the upfront costs and risks associated with traditional tooling processes; and teamed up with Caterpillar construction-equipment company in Franklin to create an inexpensive gauge used in dirty job-site conditions that shorten the operating life of a more costly part. Overall, the center has provided technical assistance to more than 100 companies, organizations and entrepreneurs over the last three years.

It was that kind of success that brought Robert McMahan to WCU as dean of the Kimmel School after serving as science and technology adviser to the governor, legislature and commerce department. “The Rapid Center is beautifully positioned to bridge the academy and the economy,” McMahan said. “We’re building relationships that give companies access to our extensive resources and to the professional expertise of our faculty, who have years of experience in industry. And together, through our students’ involvement in these complex projects, we are helping to prepare the next-generation work force.”