Washington Business Winter 2019 | Washington Business | Page 37

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Many stops were also family-run businesses, large and small.
R. Mathews Optical Works in Poulsbo is the only custom precision
optical component manufacturer in Washington state, and the first
in the nation to manufacture aspheric optics in production. Their
photonics products are used in supermarket scanners, 360-degree
cameras and much more.
“We make everything but eyeglasses” said Robert Mathews, who
started making lenses for telescopes from glass casters at age 13, and
who founded his company in 1978.
The final stop of the tour was in Tumwater at Dynamic Systems
Technologies, where founder and CEO Robert Inglin leads a small
team of about a half dozen engineers who produce industrial
automation control systems, literally working out of a garage.
The stops in between covered the great range of Washington’s
production, from Insitu’s cutting-edge unmanned aerial vehicles
made in the tiny Columbia River town of Bingen to innovative
carbon fiber recycling being developed at the Composite Recycling
Technology Center in Port Angeles.
manufacturing networks
Like seafaring ships or silk road caravans of old, the bus tour covered
modern-day “trade routes,” illuminating the rich web of supply
chains that link Washington businesses to each other and the world.
One example came as the fourth day of the trip ended at in the
picturesque northeast Washington community of Valley. There,
the Lane Mountain Silica Co. mines a nearby vein of sandstone in
the Huckleberry Mountain range that contains a very desirable
“Manufacturing means jobs, and jobs mean
more opportunities for people.”
— U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-5
crystalline structure. The rock is hauled to its production facility
where it’s refined into soft silica sand that’s used, among other
things, to manufacture glass. Its biggest customer: Cardinal Glass in
the southwest Washington town of Winlock, which was one of the
first stops in AWB’s inaugural Manufacturing Week tour last year.
Cardinal makes energy-efficient window glass, directly employing
hundreds of people — and supporting dozens more jobs 350 miles
away in rural Stevens County.
Another example is at FarWest Fabricators in Yakima County. The
company employs 100 people in the small town of Moxee because its
central location allows FarWest to dispatch deliveries to customers
with same-day service all over the Northwest, from Seattle and
Portland to Spokane and beyond.
“From here it’s an easy run,” said Brad Dawkins, senior estimator
for FarWest. Among the company’s frequent delivery stops, he
said, is Genie’s growing factory in Moses Lake — a spot the AWB
Manufacturing Week tour had visited just two days before.
In Seattle, the tour literally went onto the water, on a boat trip
departing from the maritime center at Fishermen’s Terminal. The
first destination was the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, better known
as the Ballard Locks, the busiest locks in the nation, which are the
literal gateway to the Pacific for the fishing fleets moored in Ballard
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