PATTERN EXPERIMENT GREAT PLAINS’
L
arry Spaeny, shop manager for the product development team at Great Plains Manufacturing, Salina, Kan., was frustrated by missed opportunities for casting product launches. Troughout the shop floor, he saw multiple- piece weldments that would work better as castings but remained unconverted because time wasn’t available to accomplish the redesign, re-tooling and re-testing. When Great Plains launches new farm machinery
product, the company is on a timetable to have it ready for the next growing season. Often, that means the products are designed and prototyped as fabrica- tions and weldments because they can be produced in-house without any tooling investment. Even when the intention may be to convert to a casting further down the road, resources are often not available. “Te biggest issue here is if we welded it up and did the testing first, we would
never get around to doing the casting later on, because the testing takes forever,” Spaeny said. “If you test it as a weldment and it is a structural piece, there is no going backwards to test it as a casting.” Earlier this year, Great Plains purchased a 3-D printer to produce prototype plastic
parts. It had Spaeny thinking. Perhaps the company could use the equipment to make investment casting shells to prototype its iron components. Designing parts as castings from the prototype stage would help Great Plains take better advantage of the reduced inventory and part numbers inherent in the casting process. Unfortunately, a search for
22 | METAL CASTING DESIGN & PURCHASING | Jul/Aug 2012
an investment caster pouring ductile iron came up empty. “We were down in the mouth
about it,” Spaeny said. Eventually, the tooling and engi-
neering staff at Great Plains wondered if it would be feasible to produce a sand mold pattern out of the ABS plastic produced by the 3-D printer.
Great Plains’ Guinea Pig Te first component Great Plains
experimented with was a quick-attach mount for the NP4000 NutriPro Liquid coulter assembly. Te mount holds a large disc, or coulter, to the farm ma- chinery. Te coulter assembly is designed to be removable so the farmer can use the NP4000 to pre-apply nitrogen fertil- izer to the soil, as well as reapply fertil- izer between the planted rows, using the same equipment.
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