Hydraulic Cylinder Case Study
Customer Profile: A Mississippi machining & fabricating company dedicated to supplying components to automotive, heavy truck and heavy equipment industry.
Challenge:
Speed up the spot facing process on a heavy equipment component while improving surface finish. The application requirement was to decrease part process time per part while eliminating quality problems associated with the original process. Bad finishes and a 50% rejection rate made solving this issue mission critical.
Steiner Solution:
The original process consisted of (3) CT5O integral shank back boring bars. This tool used expensive inserts @$60 each that could only be order in packs of 50. The feature was a 70.75mm (2.785) bore reaching thru 55mm (2.17) to generate a 150 mm (5.905) spot face. The spot face also had a 6mm (.236) corner radius and a 4.5mm x 45° ID chamfer. This feature was machined in 3 steps and produced surface quality inconsistencies with blends between the 3 steps. Steiner process machined the complete feature (l.D. Chamfer, Spot Face & Corner radius) in one pass. The Autofacer® was run at 150 RPM and a feed rate of 0.8 IPM
Results:
The customer realized a cycle time savings of 45 to 60 minutes per part, making the Steiner Solution 2 to 2.6 times faster than the old process and at the same time reducing insert consumption by 90%, improving surface finish quality problems, and eliminating the high rejection rate.