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On the Shop Floor “Over the years, this decision to stan-


dardize on Mastercam has proven to be of tremendous benefit to our company,” Frank said. “Mastercam has grown and its capa- bilities have improved dramatically since we acquired it. We have used these capa- bilities to improve our productivity and also to capture new streams of business.”


When the Going Gets Tough Te energy industry took a severe


downturn in the early ’90s and PFI tightened its belt to avoid layoffs and keep everyone working. Ten it got to work exploring other markets, including medical, components for pharmaceutical equipment, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, pumps, valves, etc. Although the oil & gas business had


Using Mastercam for all of the design work, PFI helped an inven- tor create a coupling with a PTFE corrosion barrier for CO2


and water alternating gas (WAG) injection wells.


Nonmetallic Machine Shop One of the first product lines the company began manufac-


turing shortly aſter it was founded by Howard Frank in 1989, was compression molded PTFE (PolyTetraFluoroEthylene) stock shapes, custom-machined components and thermally formed diaphragms for air-operated pumps. Today, the company still molds stock engineering thermoplastic shapes that are sold to other manufacturers. However, the bulk of its molding output is consumed internally and used for machin- ing engineered plastic components. Howard’s son, Steve Frank, vice president of PFI, said “We


do a tremendous amount of high-performance, high-precision machining of a variety of materials including PTFE, PEEK [PolyEtherEtherKetone], nylon, polypropylene, UHMW [ultra-high molecular weight plastic], and even some compos- ite materials that aren’t considered plastics per se.” By 1998, the company’s rudimentary CAM programming


soſtware would not allow Frank and a recently hired program- mer to generate programs fast enough to keep pace with the demand for machined plastic components, particularly for the growing oil field customer base. Together, they surveyed the CAD/CAM market, closely evaluated three products and chose Mastercam. Today the company uses no manual machines. Two seats of Mastercam X7 Mill, two of X7 Lathe along with Mastercam Solids support a sophisticated manu- facturing operation involving nearly 50 employees working two shiſts and 26 CNC machines—lathes and three-, four- and five-axis CNC mills.


58 Energy Manufacturing 2014


dipped from nearly 100% to about 20% of the company’s revenue, PFI persevered and grew because of its unique nonmetallic manufacturing expertise. Frank explained that the machining of engineering grades


of plastic is a lot harder than anyone without that experience could imagine. For example, PTFE and other engineering thermoplastics are very sensitive to temperature fluctuations. So PFI keeps ambient temperatures in the plant between 74° and 75°F (23° and 24ºC) year round to avoid nonlinear thermal expansion and contraction of materials during machining. Tere are also unique internal stresses in plastics that have


to be understood and relieved during the manufacturing processes. Finally, PFI is continually dealing with the problem of tool wear because most of the materials machined are filled with abrasive materials like glass, carbon fibers, carbon pow- der, carbon beads, and powdered metals (bronze and stainless steel). Tese fillers improve physical properties, but they can wear out tools quickly and play havoc with machine offsets. PFI has used Mastercam as a tool not only for improving


programming productivity but also obtaining the highest reasonable machine cycles while balancing the difficulties presented by thermal effects, internal stresses and tool wear along with the frequent requirement to achieve high surface finishes. Over the years, PFI has captured its manufacturing experience into its tool libraries, making it possible to select the right tools and optimal feeds and speeds on part geometry and material formulation (of which there are hundreds). When the energy business essentially went away, PFI took


its expertise in machining difficult nonmetallic parts to other markets. Te pump industry provided a logical extension of the company’s capabilities. PFI soon began custom machin- ing a variety of engineered plastic components for them, a


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