Manufacturing
MANUFACTURING
MANUFACTURING
IS THE WEAPON
We win on unit cost and salvo depth — not single-shot excellence.
Tooling · Moulding · Recycled Content · Facility · Forward Cell
We win on unit cost and salvo depth — not single-shot excellence.
Tooling · Moulding · Recycled Content · Facility · Forward Cell
Counter-UAS is a manufacturing problem before it is an aerospace one. Trading multi-million-dollar interceptors against cheap drones loses the cost exchange every time it runs. Our answer is industrial, not exquisite — cheap, mass-produced, no-radio carriers whose decisive advantage is made on the shop floor.
Because we cut our own moulds on our own 5-axis machines, iterating a design or standing up a whole new airframe is a tooling job measured in shop hours — not an outsourced capital project measured in quarters. Canada has world-class pieces and no volume base: the missing factory is the market. Salvo depth beats single-shot perfection, and salvo depth is a manufacturing property.
A modest per-round intercept probability of 0.3 compounds to ~94% across an eight-round salvo — an illustrative model, not a tested value. The cost-exchange battle is won by unit cost and magazine depth, which is to say by tooling, moulding and throughput.
For most hardware programs, injection moulding begins with a wall: an outsourced tool, a supplier's queue, and roughly eight weeks before the first shot. We own the machines and the machinists — the wall becomes internal schedule.
The industry-typical mould lead time sits between a design and its first part — an external queue on someone else's schedule, paid for at someone else's margin.
“8-week mould lead times become shop hours.”
The owned 5-axis cell machines cavity, core and inserts in-house. Tool cost collapses to machine time and steel; lead time collapses to our own shop schedule.
A fin change, a wall-thickness fix, a new payload bay — re-cut the insert, shoot parts. Standing up a new platform is a new mould family on machines we already own, not a new supplier qualification cycle.
The manufacturing thesis expressed as economics: depth of magazine is what the shop floor buys.
A cheap round in depth turns a losing cost-exchange into a winning one. Costs are modelled, not achieved results, and await verification against real production runs. The full salvo model, with its cumulative intercept-probability curve, lives on the homepage economics section.
The production flow from CAD to a finished round, stage by stage — owned capability inside the group today, door to delivery.
Airframe, mould and fixture design in one loop — designed for the tools we cut ourselves.
5-axis CNC machines cavity, core and inserts in-house. The tooling wall becomes shop hours.
Moulding presses and a process engineer are in-house — owned capability on our own floor, not a research problem.
Metal fittings, launcher hardware, jigs and gauges — machined in the same bay as the moulds.
Detect/track/cue is owned capability, built in-house on the same floor — not sourced through a partner.
Final assembly and quality inspection on our own floor — the designed end of the line, gated on the stages before it.
The same throughput logic that runs the factory runs the fleet. For a working machine, daily output is set by utilisation — and utilisation is dominated by how fast you can turn the machine around, not by how long it flies.
That insight drives a design rule across the battery-powered platforms: a common battery-pack standard, so a spent pack swaps for a full one in the turnaround window and packs, chargers and spares are one inventory across the fleet instead of one per platform. The advancing self-charging dock design (CS-700) exists to close the same loop automatically — its energy fork (hot-swap / fast-charge / inductive) is open, and we say so.
Persistence works the same way in the air: cheap airframes rotated through a watch, rather than one exquisite aircraft that never lands — manufacturing-is-the-weapon applied to endurance.
Canadian Shield sits inside SIG · Sustainable Infrastructure Group on purpose, and the materials canon draws a hard line we publish instead of blur: recycled PET where it is right, engineered resin where structure depends on it.
Every structural part is moulded glass-filled nylon — the materials canon, applied fleet-wide. A post-consumer feedstock does not carry a structural pedigree, so it is excluded by policy, not by footnote.
Recycled PET is strictly non-structural: housings, covers and the cheapest moulded bodies in the fleet — the expendable Gopher mapper is planned as a recycled-PET body. A sustainability claim we can bound and defend.
A recycled-PET / carbon-fibre composite is R&D roadmap only — not a current build claim, and this page will not dress it as one.
The boundary is the story: recycled content is real and deliberate, and it never flies under load. Where the part matters structurally, the resin is certified; where it doesn't, the fleet carries Alberta's recycled plastic — and we publish which is which.
The program runs from approximately 60,000 ft² of facility and approximately 143 acres of remote Alberta land, held within the group.
The site sits under Class G airspace — an airspace classification that comes with the geography. No formal test-range or aerodrome designation is claimed.
Every section above this one argues for owning the line. The Forward Manufacturing Cell aims that argument outward: a modular, containerized slice of our manufacturing stack, deployed so an allied nation moulds and assembles its own Goose CS-110 kinetic interceptor rounds in-country — from local feedstock, including local recycled PET — instead of hanging its magazine depth on a transoceanic supply line.
And the cell itself is not unfamiliar ground. A self-contained, containerized industrial platform built to work in the field is, in engineering terms, a rig — and this group has spent three decades designing and operating mobile horizontal-directional-drilling rigs up to 1,000,000 lb. What is new is what the rig makes, not that it is heavy mobile plant we know how to build and run.
A shipped round crosses the ocean once and is expended. A shipped factory crosses once and every round after it is born local: polymer body, fins and nose mass moulded on the buyer's own floor, assembled into complete Tier-1 rounds around the shop-air pneumatic launcher. The resupply convoy stops being an interdiction target because it stops existing.
The recurring economics stay in Alberta. Moulds and dies wear with use, and every replacement is re-cut on the same owned 5-axis machines that collapse the industry's 8-week tooling wall to shop hours. The cell sells once; the tooling, consumables, per-round production licence and service line are the annuity. Manufacturing is the weapon — and with the cell, it is also the product.
The cell exports only the low-tech, non-explosive airframe production — moulded polymer body, fins and nose mass — and the shop-air pneumatic launcher. Fire control, autonomous seekers and guidance electronics never leave Canada; nothing in the process carries a warhead or fuze, and no energetic material exists anywhere in it. The fence is not a hedge on the pitch — it is what makes the pitch exportable at all.
Containerized moulding, assembly and QA stations, commissioned once on the buyer's floor. A one-time capital sale that stands up airframe production in-country — the low-tech end of the line, and only that.
Tooling wears by design. Replacement moulds and dies are re-cut in Alberta on our own 5-axis machines and shipped as line items — alongside consumables, a per-round production licence and the service-and-upgrade line. Razor and blades, in tool steel.
The argument we make at home — a trusted, local, auditable supply chain is the capability — turned outward. The cell hands an ally that same supply chain under their own roof, inspectable end to end, fed by their own feedstock.
Status, stated plainly: the Forward Manufacturing Cell is an engineered, patent-pending system in prototype and testing, built on three decades of mobile-rig heritage. It is controlled technology — international transfer requires Canadian government permits, and export posture is counsel-first. Nothing on this page offers a cell that is available, fielded or combat-ready today.