ShopSolutions
ate opportunities for programmers and operators to come up with better processes.
“Index created an opportunity for us that was life-changing for our company,” said McMillan. “We started with a C100 automatic lathe, then a C200, and we are getting another C200. Despite its designation as a lathe, these machines are producing parts you would think came off a machining center.
The speed of the machine lets us do more with one ma- chine—more production, more setups.”
Interior of the Index C200 automatic lathe reveals design features that include slideways with good damping properties and high rigidity that can achieve accelerations up to 1 G.
There doesn’t seem to be a limit on what we can get them to do well. For us, the key advantages to the C-series machines are speed of cycles [cycle time] and speed of changeover. When you are a short-run shop—as we are with 500–1000 piece runs—changeover times become extremely important.
“The Index machines have made a fundamental shift in how people think in the machining side of TFT,” said a TFT manufacturing engineer. “Even the biggest skeptics come over and marvel as it turns out the parts in times that we thought not possible with accuracies that we did not think possible. Our programmer has it set up so that at most we are changing three tools for any job that runs across it and we have made a ton of different parts now. “We are very happy with it far beyond the production levels. There are so many features of the Siemens control that when tied to Esprit software, it became the easiest machine to set up of all our mill-turns. Our programmer has told us that when he looks at a part that he does not think will run faster on the Index machines, he ends up cutting the time in half. And when he sees a job that is well-suited, it cuts the time by as much as 70%,” the manufacturing engineer said. “For example, one of our new products, a part from our world-beater G Force nozzle, prompted a move to the INDEX, taking the cycle time we had from 14 minutes per part to 6 minutes each—and we think we can get it to 4.5 minutes, thanks to the capability of the Index. From watching the machine run, I believe it’s because this machine hesitates less when thinking, and I know it’s also because the spindle sync/ pickup and spindle acceleration in the cut-off cycle are signifi- cantly faster. I was not expecting to see such a difference in cycle time,” he said.
Thousands of enclosures Hundreds of sizes Next-day shipping
ENCLOSURES ENCLOSURES 46
ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | April 2013 POWPR DI R R BUT ON EOWEST DISTRIIBUTION CLIMATE CONTROL CLIMATE CONTROL
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150