pipes, plants, & process
point, the shop began transferring programming responsibili- ties to him for the other manufacturing systems as well. Orvie said, “Once we got rolling with Mastercam, we never looked back.” Today, these manufacturing systems support a robust worldwide turbine/generator service operation that requires the facility to supply parts for both emergency repairs and planned maintenance shutdowns. In addition, the role of the facility has been expanded to provide repair services and parts manufacture for the Hydro and Nuclear business units. To keep pace with the repair and new business units, the shop has added another Mastercam programmer and will continue to increase its current production capacity over the next few years.
Worst Case First Four years ago, the shop began looking at high-end
mill-turn systems to replace its conventional equipment. It selected one of its toughest parts, an intricate multi-hole by- pass valve, as a benchmark against which it could measure machining productivity improvements. Orvie said, “We were using many different machines to make this part. If you fac- tor in such things as stellite hardfacing and nitriding, it was taking us fi ve weeks to get this one part out the door. Actual time on machine amounted to about 80 hours.”
Refi ning Processes One of the things Orvie enjoys most about his job is that
Toshiba takes a long-range view of ongoing manufacturing process development and has encouraged him to be a Mas- tercam beta tester. This enables him to learn about, and take advantage of, some the latest features of the product as soon as they become available. When he opened his beta release early in 2015, he was amazed to fi nd a feature called “Solid Disassemble.” This
The Service Center purchased an Okuma Multus fi ve-axis
mill-turn system. Orvie said he was unaccustomed to it at fi rst. However, he added, using a post meticulously devel- oped by ShopWare in conjunction with In-House Solutions, and program modules written and simulated in the latest version of Mastercam, the machine time was reduced to approximately 16 hours and the lead-time for machining the part itself was trimmed to a day. With these types of improve- ments, it has become Orvie’s favorite machine. Orvie said that these results are typical of the magnitude of
productivity improvements and cost-factor reductions the shop has seen as they transition appropriate parts over to mill-turn manufacturing processes. Optimizing these and other process- es continues to be a work in progress as Orvie learns to apply new features that appear in each release of the CAM software.
The Okuma mills that TAES purchased are “highly optioned,” with specialized features that rely on sensors in the machine and
proprietary fi rmware to detect and eliminate chatter and collisions.
40 — Energy Manufacturing 2016
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