Every Tenth Matters
An aluminum billet begins the journey that will see it transformed into numerous roof rack rails.
you do the math and the motion study, it represents a huge annual savings for our company, without sacrifi cing any safety considerations for our workforce.”
As one might guess, JAC understands the fabrication pro- cess for putting holes into aluminum, whether for roof mount- ing, rivet placement, or trim assembly. Often the angle of the drill must be oriented to the surface of the workpiece, rather than in a typical X-Y planar arrangement. Here again, the fl ex-shaft design of the Suhner drills pays big dividends for the machine designers at JAC, as it allows them to position the drilling mechanisms in various confi gurations and tighter proximities. This allows the required accuracies, secondary counterbore operations or other processing steps to occur. After working on nearly 500 machine builds at JAC, Mike Traylor said he’s been very impressed with the fl ex-shaft drill and its adaptability on a wide variety of applications. “On one rail set for a Ford vehicle and another for a Toyota vehicle,” he said, “the old way would have involved one operator performing all the drilling, one step at a time. Today, we have up to 11 drills and a cutoff operation, all performed at once. The savings in setup time alone are off the chart.” He cited another job where the output was previously 1200 sets per day and is currently 1200 per hour. Not all of the drilling here is done with fl ex-shaft models,
however. On several dedicated machining operations, various Suhner motor-mounted drills are used, including a specially designed system for sawing. (See sidebar.)
Senior launch manager at JAC, Alberto Blanco, addressed the need for precision. “We need to hold ±0.1–0.2-mm tolerances on the drilling and ±0.5 mm on our cutoff lengths for our customers,” he said, “so the Suhner equipment capability has been very favorable in helping us deliver our value proposition to customers.” Traylor added that the drills are used virtually non-stop, so wear is inevitable, further noting the availability of Suhner rebuild kits, including O-rings and seals that make maintenance much easier for his team. Finally, Jeff Cavalier, the JAC engineering and facilities manager noted, “With the sup- port we get from Suhner, we know Mike and
his team can make it happen, every day, creating and main- taining the machines that get the job done for our customers. That’s a nice feeling.”
Edited by Yearbook Editor James D. Sawyer from material provided by Suhner Industrial Products Corp.
A Specially Designed System for Sawing
In a moment of inspiration, according to Charles Stitcher, the regional marketing manager for Suhner and the person directly responsible for the JAC Products account, the customer’s machine design team worked with Suhner application engineering to devise a system in which a motorized drill spindle assembly was outfi tted with a circular saw blade to do cutoff work, integrated into the JAC workstations.
Previously, a separate circular saw was positioned near the workstation and the cuts would be made in a secondary operation. With use of the Suhner design, a cutoff blade could be set at any angle and built into the machine from the onset. This innovation resulted in faster part handling and more accurate cutting done in a safe manner, fully integrated into the machine.
57 — Motorized Vehicle Manufacturing 2015
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