ShopSolutions
Flying-S owners Dave and Penny Shaw stand near a lineup of Haas CNC machines in the machine shop. “We are a very patriotic shop as you can see a number of American flags in this view. One of the reasons that we gravitated towards Carr Lane is the fact that they are an American company making American-made product,” the Shaws said.
“The most recent challenge facing the Flying-S is making the transition from prototype to production on an important UAV project,” said Peter Bowman, production manager/man- ufacturing engineering. “We’ve developed elaborate fixturing for carbon fiber trim of all shapes and sizes with vacuum inte- gration to help us in our CNC trimming. Our programming is working wonderfully, and we’ve invested in the proper tooling as well to deal with the difficulty of cutting carbon fiber. The issue was that we didn’t have a proper way to quickly locate and secure all the tooling that we had designed and built. What we found ourselves doing was leaving our trim fixtures set up on a large gantry-style table as much as possible and then having to tear everything down when a large part came along to make way for it. This was terribly inefficient and tied up one of our most valuable spindles. Dust collection was nearly impossible, and changeover and setup times were totally out of control,” said Bowman. Flying-S was a customer of Carr Lane Manufacturing Co. (St.
QUICK RELEASE BALL-LOCK PINS... AND MORE.
Louis), purchasing clamps, Go/No Go gages, so Bowman visited the Carr Lane booth at IMTS for workholding advice. “Colin Frost, Carr Lane special projects manager, demonstrated how Carr Lock zero-point technology could be used to combine 80% of its fixtures into just one fixture plate using just two ½" [12.7-mm] Carr Lock pins,” said Bowman. “The result was excellent locating
Fixtureworks is your source for quick release pins and accessories in inch and metric sizes from Fairlane®
Products.
The pins have a wide range of uses in fastening, locating and alignment applications and come in a variety of diameters and lengths. Available in stainless or alloy steel with T, L, ring, button and nautical handles. Also available are wire lanyard assemblies. Fixtureworks is your source for a wide variety of clamps, fixturing accessories and machine tool components.
Carbon trim fixture with Carr Lane clamps is placed inside the Haas VF-6 vertical machining center. The irregular pattern of the receiver bushings of the Carr Lock system allows Flying-S to put fixtures in several different configurations depending on the workpiece that needs to be trimmed. The operator simply loads the fixture and parts, selects the appropriate CNC program and is up and running in just a matter of minutes.
888.794.8687 •
www.fixtureworks.net See us at EASTEC Booth #5658
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ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | May 2013
ability and improved clamping. Our setup times have gone from an average of about 25 minutes to literally 30 seconds, and we’ve been able to keep our carbon trimming contained in a much smaller enclosed machine with better dust collection. We’ve
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