MRO Today - Problem: Reduce many operations to one

Problem: Reduce many operations to one

Weasler Engineering is a leading manufacturer and distributor of mechanical power transmission products for the agricultural, lawn and turf, construction, and industrial markets. Primary products include universal joints, constant velocity joints, gear boxes and drive lines.

Weasler produces a high volume of short-run jobs, the processing for which includes moving parts to several workstations for independent operations. However, this resulted in a lead time of over one week to ship a part from start to finish. Multiple setups resulted in higher than acceptable scrap rates and WIP inventories.

Weasler’s managers wanted to invest in new technology to improve overall product quality and eliminate long lead times, excessive setups, high scrap and WIP inventories. They brought in Ellison Technologies to help evaluate multi-process equipment that could combine machining processes into a single operation.

After evaluating the manufacturing process, Ellison recommended a 9-Axis Okuma MacTurn250W with milling functionality. The upper turret had full B-Axis capability and large travel in the Y-Axis, allowing heavy milling of critical part features that could not be achieved with most live-tool lathes. Fixtures were designed to satisfy the 0.0002-inch part transfer and orientation requirements between milled features performed on the two spindles.

The end result is that parts can now be processed with a single machining operation. Operations were reduced from four to one and overall setup time by 60 percent. Quality assurance measures on part orientation have eliminated scrap concerns, and the combining of machining operations have eliminated costly WIP inventories. Processing time has gone from four days across four different machines with corresponding setups, to 14 minutes. Item 134

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