“We heard from our customers that
several fleets wanted a lightweight brake drum but didn’t want to pay premium for the existing lightweight drums on the market,” said Jeff Clark, director of product management, Gunite Wheel End Components. “Tat led us to develop the Gunite Silver lightweight brake drum, the 4000x, which we released in 2013—it’s an in-between weight savings and in- between price point.” Te Silver lightweight full cast brake
$61 million was invested at the Gunite facility, including more than $35 million in machin- ing upgrades and $13 million in foundry upgrades.
drum weighs just 99.5 lbs. Gunite was able to achieve the weight savings through engineered design enhance- ments and advanced metallurgy. It is the lightest standard full-cast drum in the market and is interchangeable with competing standard full-cast drums. Te lightweight drum saves 12.5 lbs. per wheel end, 25 lbs. per axle and 100 lbs. per truck/trailer combination. Gunite would be hard pressed to make the same engineered advancements without the in-house casting facility and expertise. “When we started doing our itera-
tions of the drum, we had product en- gineering, foundry and tooling, metal- lurgy, and machining personnel pulled together on the team,” said Ed Bledsoe II, director of operations, Rockford Operations. “We would run one set of samples, do all the testing all the way through, and quickly react to achieve the optimal weight and properties that the customer was looking for.”
Time to Grow
After once again seeing profits at the end of 2013 and a healthy, incremental increase in sales through the first quarter of 2015, Accuride has transitioned into the grow phase of its “Fix & Grow” strategy. “All the work we have done across
Accuride in the last three years has put us in position to be competitive in safety, quality, delivery, lead time and cost,” Dauch said. “We are ready for organic growth, to profitably win mar- ket share against our competitors, and our world-class operating performance is already enabling us to achieve that.” Fourth quarter 2014 net sales from
Accuride’s three business units were $178.8 million, compared with $144.7 million in the same period in 2013. It
26 | METAL CASTING DESIGN & PURCHASING | Mar/Apr 2015
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