BOARDMAN — Talk with Mark Lamoncha about the innovative strides his company, Humtown Products, is making in additive manufacturing and it’s likely the conversation will swing to what he calls “the power of next.”

“We should always be looking for what is next,” said Lamoncha, president / CEO. “I’m always looking for what is next.”

Well, what’s next for the company — a leader in manufacturing conventional and 3D printed sand cores and molds for the foundry industry — is reinventing the former Gorant’s candy factory at 8301 Market St., Boardman, into a high-tech manufacturing facility that will house the Columbiana-based company’s additive division.

The transformation is nearing completion.

Lamoncha figured by the end of June that all 12 of the company’s additive machines would be relocated from Leetonia to Boardman. The moving process started in the middle of March after the company readied the Market Street building for the arrival of the printers and employees.

To move the machines, Lamoncha said, they need to be disassembled, moved — which required to semitractor-trailers for each for hauling — and reassembled. It’s a process that can take up to 10 days, he said.

“There is an extensive leveling process,” Lamoncha said when the machines are put back together. “It is probably the most important thing. Everything has to be lined up when you put it back together.”

The company’s traditional sand core and mold manufacturing will remain in Columbiana, as will, at least for some time, packaging and shipping operations, Lamoncha said.

Lamoncha purchased the approximately 55,000-square-foot building for $3.5 million in October through his real estate holding company, Lamoncha Real Estate Holdings LLC.

He invested about another $500,000 to improve the building, including widening every entranceway, including the dock doors, to make room for the large printers, a new parking lot and replacing all of the 700 light fixtures with new, more efficient LEDs.

All of the vertical service lines that fed the candy machines were removed, too, but the overhead horizontal piping was untouched.

“All of the factory still has the 3-inch horizontal piping in the ceilings. We cut all the verticals down that went to the machines, but they turned the boiler off and forever, that 3-inch pipe will have 3 inches of chocolate in it,” Lamoncha said.

Lamoncha’s father, Russell, founded Humtown in 1959. Then, the company was Humtown Pattern, a pattern shop in Columbiana. The company entered into sand core and mold manufacturing in the late 1970s and in 2014, created Humtown Additive to produce sand cores and molds using additive manufacturing. The company received its first 3D sand printer through a partnership with YSU.

AWARD-WINNING COMPANY

Earlier this month, the National Association of Manufacturers announced Humtown won the 2024 Manufacturing Leadership Award in the Transformational Business Cultures category for the Industrial Athlete Operating System, a book co-written by Lamoncha that addresses cultural shifts that remake a workplace into a performance center.

The recognition, Lamoncha said in a release announcing the award, “underscores our relentless pursuit of unlocking our team members God-given potential, which is the cornerstone of Humtown’s culture.”

In 2020, Humtown won the Small to Medium Manufacturer of the Year Award, and also was presented the association’s Engineering and Production Technology Leadership Award for commercializing 3D sand printing and the Talent Management Leadership Award for their visual earnings system, a system that enables production employees to see and monitor their rate of pay in real time.