Last week, Coast Composites LLC, an Ascent Tooling Group company, announced it won a contract from Boeing to manufacture the largest-ever wing skin molds for the Boeing 777X. According to an October 20 press release, Ascent will produce a set of lay-up tooling, consisting of four individual molds, to be used at Boeing’s new facility in Everett, Wash., to manufacture the 777X’s composite wing skins.

Coast Composites will manufacture the molds with its modular tool building system with patented laser technology that the company has used to make 26 previous wing skin mold builds. The tooling segments will be made with Invar, a custom steel alloy that matches the thermal expansion properties of the composite material used for the wing skin. The final wing skin tools will be more than 110 feet long, up to 21 feet wide and will weigh approximately 80,000 pounds each.