Smart Tooling Choices Ensure Shop Survival
Eightfold productivity improvement in roughing and finishing frees up capacity and gets more parts out the door
(LATROBE, PA) - Established in 1965, Brighton NC Machine in Brighton, MI, is a survivor. Through a combination of investing in reliable equipment and keeping a constant eye out for productivity improvement opportunities, the family-owned job shop enjoys long-term supplier relationships with major OEM customers in automotive, heavy equipment, and military manufacturing markets.
Rather than resting on its accomplishments, Brighton NC personnel are always looking for an edge. "Based on our experience, we pretty much know how we're going to process a part. Anything that adds to the number of parts we machine a day is to our advantage," says Patrick Barton, who has 20-plus years with the company.
This approach, always seeking an advantage, certainly applies to tooling choices. About nine months ago, Bob King, metalworking sales engineer with Kennametal Inc., paid a visit to Brighton NC to quote some grooving inserts and inquire about the company's other tooling needs.
King may have been aware of Brighton NC as an established shop, but didn't know that the company had doubled its employee head count over the past three years, straining capacity limits. Together, King and Barton examined one of the shop's major jobs: a three-piece exhaust manifold machined from heat-resisting ductile iron casting on four new high-speed Mitsubishi horizontal machining centers. Critical tolerances on the manifold were flatness and finish on multiple faces as well as hole location. Patrick Barton describes the job as "demanding... the customer's truck is here every day for parts. Cycle time is key. If we don't get decent cycle times on these parts, we're going to need to add machines to meet our delivery dates."
King recommended trying Widia Heinlein M750 HexaCut milling cutters on the parts for both roughing and finishing passes. The Widia Heinlein cutters have an adjustable-wedge clamping system for holding indexable hexagonal double-sided roughing and finishing inserts with 12 total cutting edges. The Kyon ceramic inserts are particularly well-suited to milling ductile iron, and the cutter's negative cutting angle ensures smooth milling with low cutting force.
In performance, Barton found the M750 HexaCut tools yielded an eightfold advantage for Brighton NC. Where the former cutters had a ceiling of 30 ipm (inches/minute), the Widia Heinlein cutters achieve 240 ipm regularly. "Where we were facing having to add more machines, now we're moving more jobs to these horizontals," Barton affirms. "We've freed up a lot of capacity. Tool life is longer, too, so we're saving even more time that we used to spend indexing and changing inserts. In short, they go faster and last longer."
Barton points to the new Widia Heinlein cutters as being right in line with his company's program of continuous improvement. "We're low-overhead here; everyone's trying to improve efficiency," he explains. "Anything that gets us to better, faster, cheaper machining is our ammunition to help keep jobs here."
Kennametal Inc., Latrobe, PA; (800) 446-7738; www.kennametal.com
