A year on the line

The supplier said its new cutting oil would run for a year before it needed changing.
Guess who got to test it every two weeks?

In automotive manufacturing, changing a procedure, a part or even a fluid, no matter how seemingly insignificant, is a massive undertaking. Just the thought of all the testing, retesting, documentation and analysis ahead is enough to kill many ideas right out of the chute.

When a company does consider making a change, it tests in one small area, retests, pulls endless sample parts and inspects them to the moon and back before even thinking about rolling out a new process plant-wide. It’s just gotta be done.

For a full year, engineers at DENSO worked with both distributor and supplier field specialists to test a new cutting fluid on one production line before DENSO would approve the oil for broader use.

Two critical areas required testing the performance of the new cutting oils and the quality of the parts it produced. DENSO operations technicians Jeff Allman and Andy Breadwell pulled test parts, documented fluid viscosities, monitored parts breakage and other quality metrics on the test machines and compiled exhaustive reports for the parent company engineers.

“We conducted tool life studies on the tooling to make sure cutting life was comparable with tools running on our existing coolant,” Breadwell says.

Studies were conducted every two weeks initially and then monthly. Allman and Breadwell pulled and measured work pieces, pulled tooling and photographed it. They also documented wear amounts on the cutting tools and counted how many parts it could produce with the new coolant before it (and the oil) started to wear and deteriorate.

“Once we completed the test period and switched to the new oil, our PMs did decrease, so I’d say the project was definitely worth the work we put into it,” Breadwell concludes.

This article appeared in the October/November 2007 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2007.

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