Al Sommer was an aerospace engineer working on major defense contracts when he quit in 1973 to join a small consulting practice called Del West Engineering, Inc. Small as in one other guy – an engineering buddy named Matt Creager – a part-time secretary, and a machine capable of doing mechanical testing.

“What else can we do?”
Doing business out of a 1,400 square foot warehouse on the west end of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, they started with one research contract for aerospace giant Grumman. Four years later, they were up to their ears in aerospace research contracts and expert liability work – and bored, bored, bored. “We looked around,” Al said, “and wondered, what else can we do?”

That “what else” turned out to be titanium, which the pair had been researching for the Air Force for the last two and a half years. At the time, titanium was used by military aircraft and rockets – but little else, largely because most people didn’t know its capabilities.