Howmet Brand Guidelines: A 1926 Dental-Alloy Caster, Alcoa Howmet & the 2020 Split

A 1926 casting firm and a mining company’s new name.

Howmet Aerospace is a Pittsburgh-based maker of jet-engine components, aircraft fasteners, titanium structures and forged aluminium wheels for heavy trucks. Its roots, according to English Wikipedia, go back to 1926 and a company called Austenal, which made materials for dental appliances. Its founders, Reiner Erdle and Charles Prange, worked to improve investment chrome-based castings, and the technique let an alloy called Vitallium replace gold alloy in dental work; Wikipedia says it was popular during the Great Depression.

Aircraft work followed in the 1930s. Austenal expanded into castings for aircraft-engine superchargers when General Electric asked for help improving manufacturing practices to meet wartime production demands, the encyclopedia says. Today the company describes itself as a producer of aero-engine and industrial gas turbine components, including airfoils, rings, disks and forgings.

The name came later. In 1958 the Howe Sound Company, a metals and mining business, acquired Austenal, and in 1959 it bought the Michigan Steel Casting Company, known as MISCO, which brought a monolithic ceramic-shell casting process with thin, strong walls for better control of how the metal solidifies. Howe Sound became Howmet in 1965, marking its change from a mining company into a maker of precision metal products, so the Howmet name arrived almost four decades after Austenal began.

Pechiney, Alcoa, Arconic.

Howmet then passed through a series of owners. The French aluminium group Pechiney bought it in 1975 and in 1989 added the Cercast group of companies, taking Howmet into aluminium casting. In 1995 Pechiney sold Howmet to a joint venture of Thiokol and The Carlyle Group; Thiokol renamed itself Cordant Technologies in 1998, and in 2000 Cordant sold its stake to Alcoa, according to English Wikipedia. Inside Alcoa the business joined the industrial-components unit, became part of an investment-casting and forged-products unit in 2004, and was renamed Alcoa Howmet in 2007.

Alcoa then divided twice. On 1 November 2016 Alcoa Inc. spun off its bauxite, alumina and aluminium operations as Alcoa Corporation and renamed itself Arconic Inc., keeping rolling mills, precision castings and aerospace and industrial fasteners. Its early years under the new name were turbulent: English Wikipedia says the hedge fund Elliott Management launched a proxy contest against Arconic on 31 January 2017, criticising its share performance and spending, and that chief executive Klaus Kleinfeld stepped down as chairman and chief executive by mutual agreement with the board on 17 April 2017. In February 2019 Arconic announced a further split, under which Arconic Inc. would take a new name and a new company would be spun out. Howmet’s own release of 14 April 2020 says that on 1 April 2020 Arconic Inc. completed its separation into two independent listed companies: Howmet Aerospace Inc., the new name for Arconic Inc., and Arconic Corporation, which took the rolled-products business. A name used since 1965, latterly for one Alcoa unit, thus became the name of the whole company.

The company describes four businesses. Engine Products makes aero-engine and gas turbine parts and works in vacuum-melted superalloys, coatings and hot isostatic pressing. Engineered Structures produces titanium ingots and mill products and multi-material aircraft structures. Fastening Systems, it says, holds the number one global position in aerospace fasteners. Forged Wheels points visitors to an Alcoa Wheels website, and Howmet says it invented the first forged aluminium truck wheel in 1948. Its locations page lists sites in 14 countries, from the United States and Mexico to Hungary, Japan and Morocco.

Design and documentation.

Aerospace suppliers sell to a small number of buyers, and their imagery is built for engineers, airlines and investors rather than for passengers. The product is usually hidden inside someone else’s aircraft, so the pictures tend to show it before it disappears: an engine bolted to a test stand, a single fan blade lit in a studio, a fuselage section on a factory floor, or a cutaway drawing that opens up the layers of a turbofan or a landing-gear leg.

Factories are part of the story. Clean rooms, composite lay-up tables and long assembly halls appear again and again, often with people in them: apprentices, engineers and technicians in overalls, shown at work rather than posing. Many of these companies are joint ventures, partners or subcontractors on the same programmes, so a single engine or wing can carry the work of several firms, each telling its own part of it.

The trade has its own stages. The Paris Air Show at Le Bourget and the Farnborough show in England alternate year by year, and suppliers take chalets and stands there alongside the aircraft makers they serve. Services after delivery are a large part of the business too, and the language of aftermarket support, spare parts and maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) runs through their websites and reports.

Corporate reports often put an aircraft on the cover, even when the company makes none of it. Behind that shared look sit very different histories: century-old engine makers, plants sold off by aircraft builders, conglomerate spin-outs and private-equity buyouts. The guides in this series set out what can be checked about each one, and mark clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

A unit name that became a company.

Howmet has continued to grow by acquisition. In December 2025 it announced an agreement to buy Consolidated Aerospace Manufacturing, known as CAM, from Stanley Black & Decker. Its third-quarter 2026 results, published on 29 October 2026, say CAM was acquired in April 2026 and Brunner in February 2026, and that the company sold its disk-forging facility in Savannah, Georgia, in March 2026.

The name Arconic stayed with the rolled-products company after the 2020 separation, and English Wikipedia says private equity firm Apollo Global Management completed its acquisition of that company in August 2023. In September 2024 the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s final report condemned the firms that made and sold the London tower block’s cladding and insulation, among them Arconic Architectural Products, described by NBC News as the French subsidiary of the U.S. company Arconic, and concluded there had been “systematic dishonesty” on their part. The French business rejected the claim that it had sold an unsafe product. The cladding was installed during a 2016 refurbishment, English Wikipedia says, four years before Arconic Inc. became Howmet Aerospace.

Readers searching online should note that Arconic Corporation, Alcoa Corporation and Howmet Aerospace are three separate companies today, all descended from the old Alcoa Inc.; the company’s own site is howmet.com, and its wheels page links to a separate Alcoa Wheels site.

For a design guide, Howmet shows how a long-standing business-unit name can be lifted up to become the name of a whole listed company. Compare GKN Aerospace, another engine and structures supplier with centuries-deep corporate roots, and Parker Hannifin, an American maker of aerospace and industrial components. For this guide we use a deep teal and an alloy grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Howmet’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.