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Besler Industries Puts Pricey Part to Pasture


Converting a steel weldment to a ductile iron casting saved the agriculture equipment manufacturer $7-$10 per part. SHANNON WETZEL, SENIOR EDITOR


D


wayne Hammond was a newbie at Besler Industries Inc., Cambridge, Neb. He had just logged two weeks as draftsman at the


agriculture equipment company when his boss tasked him with fixing a problem- atic component for its farm field harrow machine. Te fabrication was too costly, too dimensionally inconsistent and took too much time to produce. Would a cast- ing sow savings for Besler? Hammond invited Smith


Foundry, Minneapolis, which pro-


duces other castings for Besler, to work with him to design a single- piece component. Uninitiated in designing a part for casting, Ham- mond received a crash course on the process’s capabilities and constraints. “I had not worked with casting


before,” he said. “So we worked back and forth to get our draft angles and parting lines right.” Te problem part was a steel fabrica-


tion consisting of three flat pieces with two bends and a hole punched in each. Te three pieces were welded together.


Each fabrication required five minutes of welding. Te component clamped onto long tubes of a harrow, which drags spikes over sod to break it up for better seeding. Each tube has two clamps, each harrow can have between three or four tubes, and a piece of Besler machinery can have up to four sections of harrows—a total of 40 clamps. Ham- mond calculated each weldment was costing the company $12-$15. “It was a fairly expensive piece


for us to make, and it didn’t really look that great,” Hammond said. “It


June 2011 MODERN CASTING | 35


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