“This is what was happening about twice a month,” said Smith. “Each time, we lost not only the cost of the cutter body, but also the value of the damaged parts and the lost produc- tion time and labor to swap out the damaged cutter. And the risk of such unpredictable failures is one reason why the operation must be attended.”
“Sheppard recognized the relationship between edge fail- ure and destruction of the entire cutter right away,” explains Ingersoll’s Randy Bohn, field representative. “More often than not, a tool wreck begins with the sudden breakdown of one insert edge. It just happens so quickly that many production engineers miss the sequence and the cause-and- effect relationship.” To find a solution, Smith’s team worked with their integrated supplies provider to examine eight tooling alternatives from all of the mainstream tooling companies. Meanwhile they ramped down the machining parameters with the incumbent tool to reduce the risk of future wrecks. From that original eight, Shep-
Roughing the ends of power steering components in one back-and-forth pass at R.H. Sheppard with an Ingersoll 6" tangential face mill eliminated all tool wrecks, extended edge life more than 2 to 1, and improved throughput about 40% on this difficult interrupted-cut operation.
pard pared down to a short list of candidates for actual testing, including the incumbent. All were the same diameter as the incumbent: 6" (152 mm). Three of the four were conventional
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