Fashionable shoes that provide a comfortable stride for diabetics and machines that make foundry molds at lower cost will gain a stronger foothold in the Erie region because of two grants totaling almost $289,000 made by the Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Central and Northern Pennsylvania in its final funding round for the 2008-2009 cycle.
Fitting the fragile feet of diabetics with shoes that respond to both the requirements of sound podiatry and individual feelings for fashion is the passion of Dr. James Lin, President and CEO of Oasis Footwear LLC, physician at the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, and son of a family of recreational shoe manufacturers.
Gaining Ben Franklin investment of $189,000, Lin’s startup venture includes a 6,800 square-feet pedorthic laboratory in Erie for the manufacture and distribution of modified shoes and inserts, and the Franklin funds will be applied to development of customized inserts. With the college, he also plans to develop a biomechanical laboratory to study gait.
Harrison Machine, which will be receiving $99,800 in an award announced last Thursday, specializes in another type of hard-to-fit, specialized form: the machines that foundries use to make cores and molds from which metal castings take a shape that becomes part of a manufactured product.
According to Pat Farver, president of Harrison Machine, the company has tested a proof-of-concept for pre-heating resin-coated sand used in the making of cores, which reduces a critical time factor by 50 percent. The new technology–Harrison’s Sand PreHeater System–has a potential market among more than 3,000 foundries in the United States (more than 200 in Pennsylvania alone) whose productivity would gain and energy and labor costs drop with the introduction of this system, which the Ben Franklin funds will help to develop.
Source: Ben Franklin Technology Partners
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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