CONTRACT PROFILE
impact such a company has on the productivity of the larger customers it serves can be enormous.
Cutting the T-slot through this coupling was grossly ineffi cient until Sonic developed the complex staggered tooth cutter at center. Each tooth starts with an aggressive rake but is relieved at the base. Even the endface view shows the complexity of this tool.
Since then they’ve grown to a full-time staff of 18 cover-
ing three shifts, running nine fi ve-axis CNC tool grinders, four cylindrical grinders, and a variety of support equipment. That’s tiny by most manufacturing standards. But Sonic is well equipped for a company in this fascinating little niche, and the
Berthiez Bumotec Dörries Droop+Rein Heckert Scharmann SIP Starrag TTL
Simply the group : Customized metal cutting solutions from a single source 1 2 3
Three examples of Starrag Group’s performance that are heading new technologies in the aerospace industry:
1 - The Scharmann ECOSPEED series of 5-axis HPC machining centers are the most productive means of producingAluminum structural parts
2 - The Starrag BTP series is designed for the 5-axis machining of complex Titanium structural parts
.
3 - The innovative technology of the Droop+Rein FOGS series of vertical overhead gantries lead to the perfect machine for producing
large landing gear components
www.starrag.com 62
AdvancedManufacturing.org | July 2015
Tools Going Down the Drain? Ridgid Tool Co. (Elyria, OH) offers a compelling example. They needed to cut a T-slot through the inside of a coupling used in one of their profes- sional-grade drain rooters. Broaching required expensive tooling and diffi cult setups, so it made no sense to produce fewer than 3000 parts at a time. This led them to try combining an end mill, T-slot cutter, and chamfering tool in sequence, but no one could produce a cutter that lasted more than a few hundred parts. And the irony of throw- ing so many cutting tools down the drain in trying to produce a drain rooter wasn’t amusing. Preinesberger decided to start from scratch and came up with a devilishly complex staggered tooth cutter. Each tooth starts with high rake and as the cutting angle “goes to 0” (i.e., no cutting action), the edge is relieved so there is no contact at all. (The existing tools were plowing the material at this point in the cut.) The next tooth attacks the part from the op- posite angle but with the same high rake at the start and relief at the bottom, and so on. The tool hogs out the material and leaves the required shape without binding or excessive wear.
“It’s not that easy to fi gure out how to do it. There are a lot of details in that little tool.”
Sonic’s target was at least 1000 parts per tool. With some
fi ne tuning of the process Ridgid has been able to get about 1500 parts per tool. Sonic’s design was also easily adapted to different sizes, giving Ridgid the fl exibility to cost-effectively produce any member of the part family from bar stock, in whatever quantity they required. Why didn’t anyone else come up with a staggered tooth cutter like this? Preinesberger said they probably did con- sider such a tool, “but it’s not that easy to fi gure out how to do it. There are a lot of details in that little tool.”
“You Need to be Able to Think Like a Tool” Creating an optimally effective cutting tool requires a rare combination of skills. The toolmaker must understand both material properties and cutting dynamics, plus be able to
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