Weasler Engineering

The company had a high volume of short-run jobs, the processing for which included moving parts to several workstations for independent operations. Management wanted to invest in new technology to improve overall product quality and eliminate inefficiencies of conventional processing methods, namely; long manufacturing lead times, excessive setups, high scrap and WIP inventories.

Assessment
The majority of parts required several turning and milling operations performed on different workstations, resulting 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. Management and Ellison Technology Engineers had been evaluating multi-process equipment capable of combining machining processes into a single operation.

Solution
Ellison Technologies’ Engineers evaluated the manufacturing process, and 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. Special fixtures were designed to satisfy part transfer and orientation requirement of .0002” between milled features performed on the two spindles.

End Result
Parts can be processes with a single machining operation. A raw casting, slug or bar stock is loaded in the left hand spindle, with parts ejected into the parts catcher from the right hand spindle complete. Operations were reduced from four to one and overall setup time by 60%. 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 4 days across 4 different machines with corresponding setups, to 14 minutes.