ChipChat: No Burr Left Behind

ChipChat Making America's Manufacturers World Class

Everyday manufacturers experience several forms of waste. Manufacturing waste eats away at your bottom line and prevents you from becoming more profitable. Waste includes transportation of items or information, unacquired inventory, excessive movement within the workplace, waiting for information or items, over processing, overproduction, defects, and underutilization of skilled workers. In our ChipChat Webinar, “No Burr Left Behind,” Ellison Technologies’ President of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies, Jeff Lage, focuses on eliminating, reducing, and automation of burrs to give you the flexibility to utilize your skilled workers to their fullest potential. If you missed the ChipChat webinar, continue reading and view the recording to get the knowledge to MAKE MORE with deburring.

Burrs and Deburring

When metal parts are machined or fabricated on machining centers, metal cutters, stamping machines, or molds, the outcome has a potential for rough edges, support pieces, or burrs that can be harmful to the part, the handler, or the customer. Burrs that are not removed or treated exposes parts to increased risks of structural integrity, corrosion, friction, and unsafe handling.

Deburring is the process of removing machined imperfections which can be done by hand with tools, chemicals, and heat, or by machining, grinding, tumblers, and automated robot. Deburring is a vital process to completing unfinished parts, however the task of deburring incurs labor costs, time, underutilization of valuable skilled workers, and when done manually by your team, increases the risk of prolonged chemical exposer, repetitive motion, and eye injury.

Deburring Waste

In the competitive manufacturing market, reducing waste costs is paramount to being profitable. With deburring in mind, we will focus on ways to Eliminate, Reduce, and Automate to minimize waste.

Eliminate

The key to eliminating burrs starts at the process approach. When we look at the process involved with manufacturing parts we can analyze areas that can be improved such as the cutting tool design, machine selections, consolidation of processes into single setups, and the design of the part itself. By utilizing multi-axis or Done in One type machining centers, and cutting tools designed for deburring, you can combine deburring into your machining process.

Reduce

Reduction of burrs can be achieved in numerous ways which can depend on your volume of production, type of parts you are producing, and available resources. Similar to eliminating burrs, reduction can also be achieved by analyzing the production process as well as the design of the part itself to find ways to achieve better finishes, higher quality cuts, better tooling, and CAM programming. Initial utilization of better tooling can greatly eliminate the occurrence of burrs, however mismanaged tool life can create burrs as the tool wears down. Integrating tool life management can maintain the quality of your tools and assist with automatic tool changes to allow unattended machining.

Automate

Deburring as mentioned before can be time consuming, tedious, unsafe for workers, and creates manufacturing waste. A huge impact on eliminating your underutilization of workers waste can be made by automating your deburring process. Ellison Technologies offers a robotic deburring cell that can take a part and deburr utilizing a robotic arm, a variety of tools with automatic tool changing, and enclosed within a protective shell to eliminate atmospheric debris.

About the Presenter

Jeff Lage is the President of Advanced Manufacturing Technology at Ellison Technologies based out of Los Angeles, CA. Jeff’s mission at Ellison is to evaluate, integrate and promote new and emerging technologies from around the world into Ellison Technologies and their U.S. market base. Jeff brings his passion for industry along with over 40 years of manufacturing experience from the job shop industry to Ellison. Jeff has a keen understanding of machining, lean manufacturing, operational excellence, supply chain management and managing a successful job shop with over 100 CNC machines and $80M in annual sales.

Want to Know More?

For more information or questions about Deburring, contact Jeff Lage at jlage@ellisontechnologies.com.

View our other recorded ChipChat webinars.