Doosan Machine Tools 5
shift,” he said. Operators check parts each hour. “You’re seeing normal deviation, nothing out of the ordinary. The machine is rigid enough that tool life is precise. We have that dialed in now.” Doosan’s
equipment, according to For-
“We didn’t even get out of the machine shop,” he added, grinning. “At Joe Gibbs racing, they had a complete machine shop. It wasn’t just new machines. Some of the machines were over 10 years old. They were producing close tolerance work out of a very difficult material. They were extremely rigid machines; we had no idea Doosan machines were even capable of
that.”
“They were very stout, very well built,” he said. “They had longevity, I mean they were producing close tolerance work year after year at Joe Gibbs Racing.” Several months later, Forward was awarded business from a new customer. “All of [the parts] were very, very heavy with milling,” Collins said. “We reached out to all the ma- chine tool manufacturers in the area to give us a quote on some horizontal milling ma- chines. Everybody came in with those ma- chines.”
Ellison Technologies (Cincinnati,
OH office), a Doosan distributor, “looked at the family of parts and Ellison came back with live tool lathes,” he said. “We thought they were crazy. They basically showed us we could do these parts quicker on a less expensive machine. But we didn’t know how to get there because we had no experi- ence with live tool lathes.” “We had to partner with someone who could get us up to speed quickly,” Meyers, the company president, said. “We could not afford to bring in a piece of equipment that was beyond where we were and have it sit on the floor for weeks. We needed to hit
the ground running.” Ellison, using a ma-
chine in a show room, demonstrated to the Forward partners how parts were made on the Lynx 220 LSY. “Ellison was the only one that went that extra mile” [without a pur- chase order], Meyers added. “It’s a game changer for us,” he said. “We knew we had to have their help to get us up and running and to train our people.”
ward’s partners, is accurate within half a degree from the start of a run through its conclusion. What’s more, the machines have stayed busy since they were acquired. Forward bought the machines in November and February. In that time, the two ma- chines combined have been in set up 12 to 14 days. The rest of the time, they’ve been in production. Forward says the machines have worked on 39 different part numbers, running two 10-hour shifts a day. One example of a product Forward makes is a part with multiple bores for a fuel rail for gasoline powered engines. With [the Doosan machines], “We can make thou- sands of those where before we could make dozens,” Collins said. “And the cus- tomer wants thousands. But we couldn’t do it [before Doosan] so there was multi- ple sourcing and we were losing. They like our quality but we couldn’t consistently supply it. Now we can supply the quality they expect from us at the volume they have to have.”
Forward bought the first Doosan machine, the Lynx, late on a Friday. It arrived the following Wednesday and was producing parts the following day. Collins said the Doosan machines proved consistently ac- curate. “They hold bores, plus or minus one thousandths (of an inch) for shift after
[The Doosan machines have] “changed who we are in the last six months, just those two machines” said Andy Schultz, vice presi- dent of engineering and another partner in the business. “It’s helped to make us consistently profitable. That’s what it really comes down to for us.”
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