Timely Investments - Brief Article

On the surface, the recent slowdown in manufacturing activity might be viewed as a justification for delaying capital investments. But a cooler economy presents some valuable opportunities for machine shop managers to prepare for better times to come. When a shop is operating near its maximum capacity, it's difficult for managers to think about cultivating new business or buying equipment. But a decline in one industrial sector may coincide with increased activity in another. Thus, pursuing a new direction is often beneficial for a company's long-term development, and shifting gears may require equipment upgrades.
Arelated opportunity in a cool economy is the reduced cost of financing. As the Federal Reserve Board continues to cut short-term interest rates to stimulate consumer spending, loans for metalworking equipment (typically amortized over 5-7 years) have become substantially more attractive. As a result, it's a propitious time for businesses to finance or refinance capital equipment. This situation enhances the resources of borrowers and creates additional options for obtaining the equipment necessary to keep pace with current technology. Furthermore, astute managers understand that seeds planted in difficult market conditions can represent the distinction between tomorrow's winners and losers.

Tooling Triad - CPC Tooling Technologies - Company Profile

To build exceptionally effective extrusion dies, this shop brings together strengths in three key areas: CNC machining, EDMing and tool room operations.

Unless you are in the middle of a forest, it's hard to look around and not see something made of extruded plastic--the siding on a house, the trim on a car, the frame of a window sash. And even if you are in the middle of a forest, the trees you see are the source of a key ingredient in many of the most advanced and complex extruded products--wood. Wood fiber and wood flours are blended with plastic resin and extruded to make a wide variety of products such as deck planking, hand rails and architectural trim. To add to the growing use of plastic extrusions, emerging techniques allow materials to be extruded as foam and encapsulated in an outer layer that is rigid and weather resistant. Shapes with hollow cross sections in complex configurations are also possible.
CPC Tooling's strategy for meeting this challenge is based on a simple concept. The company must be able to build tooling not only for customers pioneering new applications, but also for customers whose conventional applications require faster running, longer wearing, more flexible and economical tooling. In-line tooling that turns extrusions into finished pieces ready for shipping is one of the shop's specialties.

All For One, One For All

"Designing and building extrusion dies is as much an art as it is science," declares Bob White, tooling manager at CPC Tooling. Mr. White, who has overall responsibility for the production of extrusion dies and related hardware for forming and cooling extrusions, explains: "You have to understand how material behaves as it undergoes the extrusion process and then use that knowledge to design a die and the tooling that goes with it. And you have to understand all of the machining processes that enable you to build that tooling."

At CPC Tooling, those machining processes are available in three key areas, each located in its own facility within the sprawling Crane Plastics plant in Columbus, Ohio. Each one of those areas must be efficient and productive. Each must leverage the capabilities of the other two areas. Each must keep up with current techniques and equipment.

The CNC machining area is anchored by two vertical machining centers. These machines do the three-axis milling of complex die contours often referred to as coat hangers because of their distinctive spreading triangle shape, as well as two-axis milling of tool and die components.

The EDM (electrical discharge machining) area features one ram and six wire machines, whose ability to cut steep tapers in four axes is essential to the extrusion process, which converts material from a simple shape to a complex one. Wire cutting replaceable inserts, which greatly extend the life of a tooling system, is another critical job for this area.

A staff of skilled tool and die makers supplies all of the components that allow dies and other hardware to be assembled into a working system. Two toolroom areas equipped with precision mills, lathes and grinders provide the flexibility and expertise to build, troubleshoot and repair almost any die or tooling that comes their way.

"Every one of these areas is important," stresses Mr. White. "Each one is vital to our strategy. Yet each area requires its own management style and has its own technology needs," he says.

Capable And Productive

CNC machining has proven to be a key asset to CPC Tooling. CNC machining is both capable and productive. It is "capable" because it allows complex die contours to be machined in 3D. It is "productive" because it allows 2D work to be handled on a production basis, with pallet changers and shopfloor programming to keep the machine fully occupied.

Van-Am Tool & Engineering Celebrates 25th Anniversary

an-Am Tool & Engineering, St. Joseph, Missouri is proud to begin celebrating its 25 th Year of providing quality solutions to their customers' tooling, stamping, machining and manufacturing needs. An achievement not many can claim in today's tooling industry.

When discussing the company's 25 years; Ivan Russell, VanAm's president and co-founder stated, "Great employees and customers with good management are the main factors in our success. You just can't do this type of work without a good crew and we have very little employee turnover." Russell also noted that providing exceptional customer service and being diversified in the services offered and industries served is also important. Van-Am's specialized services include: design and build of progressive, transfer, louver, blank, form and draw dies (these can range from 6" x 6" up to 9' or longer); die maintenance and repair; production stamping and fabrication; general and custom machine work; CNC machining and wire EDM; design and build of jigs and fixtures; machine design, build and repair; custom fabrication and welding; robotic welding and plasma cutting; vibratory finishing; laser cutting and CNC press braking.

With the recent addition of several pieces of equipment, including a new Wire EDM, the company's equipment now includes: four wire EDM's; four vertical CNC machining centers; 13 milling machines; seven drill presses; five lathes; ten grinders including a 24" x 60" surface grinder; six saws; 16 punch presses (up to 600 ton); two robotic welders; three press brakes including a 220-ton 12'6-axis CNC press brake; two shears; a 1500-watt CNC laser cutting system; a 24 cubic foot vibratory finishing machine; and a host of supporting equipment.
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The company operates in a modem 55,000-sq.-ft. facility with 36 employees. Their equipment and talented work force allows Van-Am to serve a wide range of industries including: agriculture, automotive, construction, electrical, fuel/oil, government, HVAC, pharmaceutical and transportation.

From Manual To CNC Mills: A Three-Phase Transition - V & G Dynamic Machine & Tool Inc

V & G Dynamic Machine & Tool, Inc. of Marble Falls, Texas, uses high-end VMCs and CNC mills and employs skilled machinists and CNC operators to support the development of new instrumentation and technology for the semiconductor industry.

When Volker Steffen founded V & G Dynamics in 1988, the company was doing mainly repair work using two manual mills. Mr. Steffen knew that if he had CNC there was the promise of longer runs and production of complex parts--giving access to new markets and increasing sales and profitability. But these benefits come with a cost in terms of capital, training and learning. Mr. Steffen was looking for a way to implement GNC gradually--a transition that took the characteristics of his shop and people into consideration. He discovered an opportunity at an open house held by his local dealer. "I was at an open house at a machine dealer one weekend, and I saw a manual mill with some sort of external motors mounted on the table," Mr. Steffen says. "The dealer showed me how the mill was doing CNC work by having the power feeds move the table, under the control of a PC. Best of all, I didn't have to start using a computer right away. I could just use the power feeds in the 'Teach Mode.' You move the table to a desired position, press 'set' on the pendant, move to the next position, press 'set' again, and so on. At the end of the sequence you press 'run,' and the machine plays back exactly the moves you told it to execute. It's that simple."
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On seeing this, Mr. Steffen first began considering doing more than just manual mill work. V & G had grown to include a lot of small-volume (1 - 500 piece) production work, but Mr. Steffen was not at the point where he needed to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a single CNC. So in 1993, he decided to first retrofit one of his manual mills with the "intelligent power feeds"--a basic two-axis Servo II automated control system with the "Teach" pendant, made by Servo Products Company of Pasadena, California--which he mounted himself on a Summit manual mill with a Sargon digital readout. The cost of the retrofit was well within his reach, and the promise of increased production made the whole deal attractive. Within days, production was at levels he had never seen before, and both he and his machinists were using the "Teach Mode" feature without problems.

Such use of a basic retrofit package makes sense for shops where owners and operators don't have prior experience with CNCs. In the case of V & G, its manual mills had essentially become three different machines with one simple retrofit: one that still does manual work, one that uses the Teach Pendant and one that can perform CNC work (when connected to a dedicated PC). The DRO interface adds accuracy to the Acme lead screw by using the scale for positioning accuracy instead of the encoder on the motor, In addition, the DRO enhances the machinist's productivity.

With the Servo II control system used for the retrofit, one-of-a-kind or production run parts can be machined, and the table can be moved either using the pendant or handwheels. The "taught" programs are limited to straight line and angle cuts. The system cannot be taught to machine a circle. Subroutines can be called up, and program steps can be changed, added or inserted. It's easy to delete entire programs from pendant memory, or delete a subroutine call--which is useful when "programming" on the fly. An operator also can set, clear or drag axes travel limits (for example, reset limit beyond current position) and can playback a program held in the pendant's memory.

The Servo II control system can be made more productive by hooking up a PC, which simply can be used to transfer programs between the PC and the pendant; with Servo CNC software and a dedicated PC, the machine has full CNC capabilities. This comprises the second step in the gradual conversion to CNC machining. Programs "written" on the pendant can be transferred to the PC for storage and for re-use at a later time. The transferred pendant programs arc converted to common CNC codes. Conversely, programs can be written and edited on the PC and transferred later to the pendant, though only a limited set of CNC codes are available. This means two things: Operators can generate CNC code without knowing programming, and they can execute previously written CNC code without using the control (it's done via the pendant). Production goes up, and accuracy and repeatability improve. The absence of a steep learning curve makes training the operators brief and inexpensive.

V&G began by doing most of its CNC work using the conversational mode programming on the control. By going through a step-by-step process, the operator answers simple questions about the current job, and the control automatically develops a program, which is then seamlessly translated into G-code that can be used on any Servo CNC machine. Even if the operator makes a mistake in the programming, he or she can easily edit the specific line that needs correction

Cole National Corporation

Once an optical retailer with nearly 3,000 outlets in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean, Cole National Corporation was acquired by Italy's Luxottica S.p.A. in 2004. Luxottica proceeded to fold Cole's operations into its North American Retail Group, and while Cole's holdings (such as Pearle Vision) continued to thrive, the Cole structure was dissolved. Over the course of its history, Cole National had dabbled in specialty retail ventures ranging from key cutting services to children's toys to cookie-baking to shoe repair and watchbands. Optical retail, however, began to play a large role in the company's strategy in 1996 when it acquired Pearle Inc. in a deal that made it the second-largest optical retailer in the United States. In 2004, at the time of the Luxottica acquisition, the company operated as a leading provider of vision care products and services—including managed vision care programs—and personalized gifts through its Things Remembered stores.

Early History
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Company namesake and guiding light Joseph E. Cole was born in Cleveland in 1915, the youngest of nine children. He started his retail career with Cleveland's National Key Company in 1935 at the age of 20. He left National Key nine years later to establish the key division of Curtis Industries, another Cleveland business.

Cole's first key shop was set up in the parking lot of a local Sears, Roebuck & Co. store that same year. By the end of the decade, Cole had built his little sideline into America's second-largest key retailer. The self-made entrepreneur was coronated "king of keys" in 1950, when he acquired National Key and Curtis' key division, the industry's two top players. The newly unified firm took the name of its larger constituent, National Key. (Although National Key was founded in 1932, Cole National claimed 1944 as its inaugural year.)

Joe Cole's key-selling concept was predicated on the idea that keymaking was a highly specialized, service-oriented business. While mass retailers wanted a share of this segment's high profit margins, they did not want to deal with the equally high level of training, service, and inventory control it demanded. Cole leased space from such leading department stores as Sears, Roebuck and Co., Montgomery Ward, and Kresge's. He then installed key-making machines, trained store employees to cut keys, and oversaw the operations' complex 3,000-unit inventory. While Cole neither manufactured keys nor owned stores, Cole found a profitable niche in providing its services to customers and retailers.

A company executive would later characterize Cole's counters as "an oasis of service in a sea of self-service." The tiny selling areas emerged as the most productive areas—in terms of profits per square foot—in some stores. During the 1950s, the company expanded into the manufacture and sale of key chains and jewelry, and launched a while-you-wait shoe repair division.

Public Offering Leads to Growth in the 1960s

The explosion of automotive and home sales in the postwar era made expansion of the replacement key industry virtually inevitable. Less than a decade after assuming the helm of National Key, Joe Cole increased sales fourfold, from $2.33 million in 1950 to $10.52 million in 1959. When the firm went public that year, it sold out its entire offering in one day. The Cole family retained a 25 percent stake in their company, which by that time was netting over $635,000 annually.

That same year, Cole tested a new concept in optical retailing, establishing an eyewear counter within space leased from a Detroit Montgomery Ward store. This venture was based on the same concept as the company's key business. Company strategists recognized that mass retailers had the traffic, but not the expertise, to run such an operation. Masco Optical became the foundation of a chain of optical counters that numbered over 150 locations by the end of the 1960s. Optical centers had become Cole National's largest division by 1964, contributing about half of annual sales.

Although CNC retained a focus on retailing, it also diversified into manufacturing during the 1960s. It acquired Sterling Industries, a Cleveland manufacturer of aluminum, steel and plastic products in 1961, thereby winning an exclusive contract with Welcome Wagon. In 1966 Cole National merged with Susan Crane, producers of giftwrap, and acquired the Gene Upton Co., manufacturers of self-adhesive metal letters and numbers. Two years later it acquired Manco, Inc., a manufacturer of Topps and Everbest brand watchbands. The Manco purchase included Canadian, British, and Japanese retail outlets. Griffon Cutlery Corporation, a marketer of manicure tools, was added to the roster in 1969. These acquisitions more than quadrupled Cole National's sales to over $40 million, but also invited speculation from analysts that the company had over-extended itself. In 1970, in fact, the retail conglomerate's profits declined by half.

Company uses CAM to bring machining in-house

For any company that designs new products, communicating its designs outside of its walls is always a source of anxiety. Outsiders who get proprietary information can use it to become a competitor.

This is the main reason why Jeff Smith, president of Triad Solutions LLC (Moorpark, California), decided to do some of his own machining in-house. The company made this transition without hiring a machinist, without making a large capital investment and without undergoing a big learning curve. Even though the shop had no machining experience, it has been able to machine its own parts quickly and efficiently, thanks, in large part, to the intuitiveness and accessibility of CNC technology today.We realized the most important thing for us to do is maintain complete control of certain critical parts that have earned us a lot of business," Mr. Smith explains. "We didn't want to reveal the details to competitors or vendors."

Triad is a developer of cryogenic test dewars, which are metal containers made like a vacuum bottle that allow infrared sensors and arrays to be tested at very cold temperatures. The shop machines the dewars' vacuum interfaces for electrical circuits, as well as internal components such as cold pedestals, heat-switch components, light baffles, device sockets and heater enclosures. It also prototypes parts for new designs. The company's customer base includes high-tech aerospace companies that work with infrared sensors and universities that require these devices to research materials.

Mr. Smith knew that he would have to find a CAM software program that would allow direct-to-NC-programming from 3D designs. At the time, the company was happy using TurboCAD, a program developed by IMSI (Novato, California) that allows the user to manipulate AutoCAD drawings. So when the time came, Mr. Smith inquired about the company's CAM capability.

With this new CAM capability, the shop uses a benchtop three-axis CNC milling machine from Taig (Chandler, Arizona).

After implementing TurboCADCAM, the company started producing parts within a couple of weeks. During that time, employees had to learn the specifics about formatting the software to work with the CNC machine. Then they had to optimize the machining steps to produce quality parts, which Mr. Smith says took time to perfect. "We produced many a scrap part in the process because of our ignorance in several areas, mainly with machine setup and proper settings for the material being machined," he says.

The company is now capable of machining 20 percent of its own parts that it couldn't machine without the CAM application. The company did not have to hire any more people to add to its five-person staff, nor did it have to purchase more than one CNC machine.

Although it didn't take the staff long to get up to speed with the new software, Mr. Smith explains that the company isn't working with complex parts, exotic materials or tight tolerances. The shop mainly machines aluminum, and tolerances are normally in the range of 0.005 inch.

Every job at the shop begins with the design of a product requested by a customer, typically in the form of written specifications. The shop translates the specifications into a 3D model that it reviews with the customer prior to fabrication.

Now that Triad has been machining parts for a while, it has discovered a range of benefits that go beyond protecting its own designs. Not only does the software aid in keeping company costs down, it also has improved Triad's customer service. For example, job turnaround time has improved because instead of sending a design out to be machined, it's possible to machine a part in one day. "We have literally talked about the design of a part with a customer and delivered the finished part all in the same day," Mr. Smith explains. "It takes maybe half an hour to set up the material on the machine, and then it's ready to go."

Repairing a customer's part is also much quicker in-house. A repair could take as long as 2 weeks when Triad outsourced its machining, but now the company can make its repairs on the spot.

Software is the CNC - includes related article on retrofits - computer numerical control

Almost every longstanding shop has had a machine like this - good iron but the controller is shot. The difference is that Melling Manufacturing Group in Jackson, Michigan, was able to bring their vertical machining center back to life. And it didn't take an expensive maintenance program. All it took was replacing the old hardware-based CNC with a software-based system, running on a mail-order personal computer. This PC control not only resurrected the machine tool, but it also lets the machine run better than it ever did with the old controller.The way it was, the most we could get for that VMC as a trade-in was its scrap value," said Melling President Dave Horthrop. This 45-man shop had owned the machine since 1985, and relied on it for years. But over time, the control unit had experienced its share of problems, with downtime getting longer and longer and repair bills going higher and higher.

Even when it was running, the machine was very difficult to program. The proprietary control was badly out-dated and no longer supported by the builder.

"Eventually it got to the point where, at best, we could use it only as a programmable drill press. Even at that, our machinists avoided using this machine as much as possible - most of the time it just took up valuable floor space," Mr. Horthrop recalls.