SPS Technologies, whose Pa. plant was partly destroyed by fire, is the sole source of some U.S. military parts

The planned partial demolition of the fire-ravaged SPS Technologies flagship factory in Abington would leave a hole in U.S. design and production of the specialized nuts and bolts, rivets, and other fasteners that pilots and passengers rely on to hold airliners, planes, helicopters, and other vehicles together, and make them repairable.

They may look like the cheap metal nuts, bolts, washers, and slots that you buy retail at the hardware store.

But SPS and its rivals design and make parts to work under years of heavy use and tough conditions, to prevent catastrophic failure.

A bolt may be made carefully weaker at a point to shear off when it’s overloaded or hit by debris, so a damaged part will fall away instead of buckling into a nearby engine. A metal nut may hide cavities wound with nylon or composites, so it will lock in place. A fastener may be made of unusual alloys to withstand high temperatures, or plated with a harder metal to resist surface damage. Screw threads may be closely engineered to fit more exactly, without the wobbly margin allowed in building construction.

SPS, owned by the Precision Castparts unit of multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Corp., is one of a few Department of Defense-certified suppliers for some of the basic parts used in the Chinook helicopters built by Boeing at its Delaware County plant, the giant Boeing Stratolifter cargo plane, Tomahawk missiles, Apache Longbow and Black Hawk attack helicopters, F-15 fighter jets, and others.

In some cases it is the only approved supplier; the fire damage may force industry and the military to find other sources.

The company, once a paternal employer (neighboring Hallowell Park is named after the founding family; workers resisted repeated unionization efforts), has cut the Abington plant workforce by more than half, to 574, since 2003, when SPS, which also includes facilities in California, England, and other sites, was purchased by Oregon-based Precision Castparts.

Buffett has said he overpaid when his company bought the Precision Castparts group in 2016 for more than $30 billion. Five years later he acknowledged he had “paid too much” and overestimated future profits, and wrote off $11 billion of the purchase as a loss.

Berkshire Hathaway, which owns a mix of businesses, has pressed its manufacturing subsidiaries to cut costs and boost profits. Precision Castparts’ sales, including SPS and many other factories, totaled around $10 billion a year — just 3% of Berkshire Hathaway’s total revenues, noted Bill Stone, chief investment officer of $20 billion-asset Glenview Trust Co. in Louisville, a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder. He said aerospace orders for the company had recently grown “at a good clip.”

“Having this plant destroyed will affect the supply chain,” said Adam Eichler, president of Component Central, a Stanton, Calif., company that distributes 250,000 kinds of new and used industrial components to customers.

SPS makes “basic hardware for equipment from computers and Hummers, to jets and ships and nuclear plants,” said Eichler in an interview. “Other companies can be qualified to build those materials, but of course that can take months.

“You have to be specialized to supply this hardware. Those bolts have lives on the line. Landing gear, for example, can have 1,000 pieces of hardware.”

When parts professionals see video of an air accident, such as the hard landing, fire, and overturning of a Delta jet in Toronto Monday, sending 21 passengers to the hospital, they automatically wonder which bolt or assembly failed, Eichler added.

The parts are made mostly of metals — aluminum, steel, or cast alloys of copper, nickel, and other metals — along with nylon and other materials that can, for example, ease a bolt into a hole, or stop it from unwinding.

“The polishing products and the plating products,” which help leave a thin, durable film of a finishing metal over another, “that’s where it’s toxic,” Eichler added. “You have to have high-quality safety all the time.”

He noted that SPS’ other plants include one in Garden Grove, Calif., close to his warehouses. “They’ve been busy,” he said. “Their parking lot seems to be full all 24 hours.”

The devastation at the SPS plant in Abington “certainly is a setback” for Philadelphia’s military-industrial economy, but the region has other manufacturers “who can step in to help close the gap,” including several who are already certified by the Department of Defense, said Sylvia Wower, vice president of the Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center, which advocates for manufacturing in the region.

The Defense Logistics Agency, a branch of the Defense Department that sources parts and equipment, regularly advertises for new or alternate suppliers for products made by SPS, in hopes of diversifying from dependence on a few makers.

Here are examples of fasteners for which SPS is the only or one of a few approved federal suppliers: