Re:Build plans a larger Rock Hill manufacturing footprint

Re:Build plans to invest approximately $20 million in a 130,000-square-foot advanced manufacturing facility in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The expansion is intended to triple its local production footprint and create 150 jobs by 2028.

The planned capabilities include:

• A clean room for precision composite fabrication;
• Additional cold storage and an enhanced quality laboratory;
• A vertical machine mill and heat-treatment oven;
• An expanded paint booth.

The project has support from a $100,000 South Carolina Department of Commerce grant. Co-founder and chief executive Miles Arnone said the investment is intended to help customers move complex programmes from development into full-rate production.

Re:Build acquired Rock Hill-based Composite Resources in March 2021. The business made composite parts and structures for aerospace, defence, space, industrial and automotive customers. The acquisition followed Re:Build's purchase of Oribi Manufacturing, a thermoplastic-composites specialist in Commerce City, Colorado, in late 2020. Both businesses were to operate within the Re:Build Composites unit.

Steve Mead, then president of Re:Build Composites, said the investment programme was intended to expand Composite Resources' established team and capabilities. Re:Build's stated objective was to integrate new technologies with conventional manufacturing businesses to support their growth and performance.

Re:Build was headquartered in Framingham, Massachusetts, when it announced the transaction. Mead described the group as a standalone company investing over many years in manufacturing businesses across several industrial sectors.

Composite Resources was founded by Jonathan Bennett in 1992, initially as a composites-engineering consultancy operating from his garage. By 2001, the business had grown enough to build a facility in Rock Hill, with a second building for sister companies added in 2010.

A plant tour published in November 2018 documented autoclaves, freezers and paint booths on the shop floor. Workers also used presses to compression-mould carbon-fibre and epoxy brackets for video monitors on aircraft seat backs. These were operations observed at the earlier site, preceding the newly announced expansion.