Master Craft Extrusion Tools on 771 Mill St. in Northport, owned by Don Allington, has a unique specialty: tools and dies for aluminum and brass extrusion. In laymen’s terms, they create machines that compress these metals into various shapes, including pipes, mandrels, and other tools.
As a producer of aluminum and brass extrusion dies and tools, Master Craft caters to a niche and highly competitive industry. Ordinarily, these kinds of dies extrude steel. Their list of customers includes some of the largest producers of aluminum in the world like Alcoa, Norsk Hydro, and Kaiser Aluminum.
But Master Craft’s highest profile client was NASA. Back in the 1990s, Master Craft produced its largest aluminum extrusion die – the largest die of this kind ever made, as far as Allington knows – to fabricate the exterior fuel cells for space shuttles. The unit produced pipes 33 inches in diameter and about 40 feet in length, which were cut up and added to other pipes to assemble the cells.
