5 Axis Machining Helps Reduce Setups

Advance Turning & Manufacturing Inc. is bursting with new business, primarily medical and surgical products, as global competition drives up the demand for innovation and squeezes margins. Helping it reduce setup times, add capacity, and jump into full five-axis programming is Edgecam from Planit Solutions.

"Reducing setup time is a major goal here," says Shannon Shepherd, Advanced Turning & Manufacturing operations manager. Setup times are crucial because job lots average a little more than 50 pieces, and some production cells run as many as eight jobs a day.

Trimming a few minutes off the setup time for each of those eight jobs would free up enough time to run a ninth. Advance Turning ships about a thousand jobs a month. Most of its 27 production cells have two turning machines and one machining center. Production employment is 112 people.

Edgecam is helping hike productivity in computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) as programmer workloads undergo three related surges:

• One-fourth more machine tools to program. In 2007-08, Advance Turning bought and installed six vertical machining centers and four lathes.
• More complicated programming, as these are all four-axis machines - not too many years ago, Advance Turning did little more than two-axis turning, although its productivity was always high.
• An additional 40 CNC machines to deal with due to acquiring a large nearby machine shop.

Long-Term Benefiting

"What we like about Edgecam is the confidence it gives us that we can handle all of this growth," says John Macchia Jr., Advanced Turning & Manufacturing president. "This expansion is by far the biggest in our history. Programming is one operation we don't have to worry about."

Some noted benefits seen are:

• Setups reduced with standardized program formats.
• Programming productivity gains as high as 20% a year.
• Accommodates sharp increase in programming workload.
• Moving smoothly into full five-axis programming.
• Handles small, fragile, tighttolerance parts no problem.
• Performs near full automation for repetitive tasks.
• Two programmers serve 50 CNC machines.

Advance Turning machines a wide range of products for the medical, aerospace and marine industries. To meet increasing demand from the medical and surgical industry, the company manufactures components for heart pumps, bone saws, power pack and blood vacuum pumps used during surgery and kidney dialysis.

Sales of these products are expanding 15% to 20% each year, and so are the challenges in machining them. "Some of the parts we machine have tolerances in the range of three or four tenths of thousands (0.0003" to 0.0004")," Shepherd says. "And many of these are delicate: some have walls as thin as 0.050" or less."

Another challenge in the production of medical and surgical products is the stringent requirements for surface finishes that must be applied before the product can be shipped.

Advance Turning also machines aircraft and aerospace parts such as solenoid valves, pumps, controls and actuators for fuel systems, flight controls and landing gear, as well as heat- and corrosionresistant fittings and flanges for exhaust systems. Aero sales are steadily increasing, but the demand is not growing as rapidly as medical and surgical.

Advance Turning bought and installed nine high-end turning-and-milling machines in 2007 to help accommodate the demand surge. The company has more than 50 CNC machine tools, including five Mazak Nexus 510CII vertical machining centers, two Mazak VTC-200B vertical machining centers with five-axis positioning capability. The company also has a Haas VF2 with a trunnion capable of five-axis simultaneous machining. All these machines are used in the production of medical products and are all programmed with Edgecam.

The push into five-axis is aimed at eliminating some setups altogether. Five-axis machining allows many jobs to be completely machined after one setup and most others after two setups rather than the usual three.

With the recent acquisition of Lee Blake Precision Machining, Advance Turning nearly doubled its machining capacity. The acquisition brought in 40 CNC machines and several skilled employees. The addition was crucial for the company to continue providing quality products on a timely basis and to help alleviate backlog.

Despite the jump in the number of machines to program and the unprecedented complexity of the new Mazaks, Shepherd still wants continuing gains in productivity from his two programmers - Paul Olszewski and Tony "Floyd" Macchia. A former programmer himself, Shepherd occasionally lends a hand. "Even after 10 years of using Edgecam, our programming productivity is still rising," he says, "on some jobs by as much as 20%."

The high demand for medical products is driving the success of Advance Turning as well as it expansion. The ceaseless innovation of industry leaders has combined with an ongoing push to outsource manufacturing has led to Advance Turning's prosperity amid global time and cost pressures.

Many U.S. firms outsource as much as possible to contract manufacturers in order to yield high capital returns while keeping costs down, delivery times short and inventories low.

"We are the manufacturing arm of our customers," Shepherd says. Advance Turning gets and keeps its work "due to our abilities for quick turnarounds and strong customer service. Edgecam's role in this is its ability to get things programmed quickly and efficiently."

OPPORTUNITY and CHALLENGE

Contract manufacturers combine the process, expertise, and prototyping of a job shop with the capabilities of an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to compete in a global market. Advance Turning handles all machining, including electrical discharge machining (EDM), Swiss-type machining, with two Citizen lathes, and inspection for all of the parts that they manufacture.

Advance Turning relies on nearby shops for its own outsourced operations such as grinding, plating, cleaning, passivation, anodizing, heat-treating and polishing. The company machines parts from a variety of raw materials; high-nickel alloys, titanium, carbon steel, stainless steel, iron, copper, brass and several plastics.

In addition to machining par ts, Advance Turning's programmers also finalize customers' designs. "Drawings for turning are very simple," Olszewski says, "just a few lines to generate dimensions into the toolpaths." Turning accounts for 60% of machining and these programs are usually done in less than two hours including the toolpaths. "Drawings for the mills and machining centers take much longer - three days to a week each," he adds, "but that includes fixtures and workholding."

CAM CAPABILITIES

In order to seize the growth opportunities, Advance Turning is implementing new technologies and refining existing methods. The rising use of CAM in programming and machining assures Edgecam a central role in the manufacturing industry.

Within two floating licenses, Advance Turning has Edgecam packages for two- and four-axis turning, advanced C- and Y-axis turning, EDM, three-axis milling, multiplane milling, five-axis machining (3+2 and full simultaneous), surfaces design and Code Wizard for generating post-processors.

Most CAM tasks have been automated with Edgecam's built-in coding tools, Program Control Integration or PCI. They allow Olszewski and Macchia to keep up with 50 CNC machines.

Whether programmed in two, three, four or five axes, just about every Advance Turning job is complicated. Some milling jobs require 24 tools per setup and some turning jobs call for as many as 16 tools. This includes a full range of end mills including customs and specials for generating specific corner radii.

"And this is for parts smaller than your fingertips," Olszewski says.

Edgecam helps reduce setup times because the program formats have little variation and it provides standardization with libraries and databases such as Tool Store. "Regardless of who programs the job, this consistency creates comfort and trust with the operators. That consistency also helps speed up job-to-job changeovers," Shepherd points out. Edgecam's consistency allows programmers to reduce variability, extend cutting tool life and make cycle-time estimates more accurate.

"In our production cells, everything is cut right then and there, ASAP," Macchia says. "We may change a radius for better machining or add a couple of extra machining passes to meet surface-finish demands. All this is very quick and easy to do with Edgecam."

As of June 2008, the company was running three five-axis machines. "Two machines are mainly positional though they can be run in any combination of four axes at the same time. Advance Turning has used four-axis milling for several years. The third machine, a Haas VF2, is full simultaneous five-axis. We just finished our first job on it with Edgecam and it worked great."

FOCUS ON SETUPS

For most contract manufacturers, setup times drop each time a job is run. But eventually the gains level off and productivity gains fade. In recent years Advance Turning's setup times have fallen on average by 50% - continuous improvement at its best.

"We try to do a lot of unique things in the production cells to expedite setups," Shepherd explains. "Where Edgecam has helped is in its speed of producing the necessary programs. Its tight association between geometry and toolpath is a huge plus."

Edgecam's automation of repetitive processes that rerun unchanged has permi t ted Advance Turning to discontinue hard automation - PCIs, especially for turning. PCIs will eventually be superseded by the flexible automation of Edgecam Strategy Manager.

"The big factor for us is the way Edgecam handles redundant CAM steps," Shepherd says. "With PCIs, you push a button on-screen and a box pops open asking for job number, operation sequences, dimensions, tolerances and surface finishes. As soon as you input this data, Edgecam starts drawing the part. The toolpathing and sequencing of cuts are also automatic, which is why we bought Edgecam. PCIs are like programming in C, and they can be massaged as our needs evolve.

"What we are getting in CAM and manufacturing," he summarizes, "are fewer setups and faster ones. That translates directly into speedier job-to-job changeovers and more output with the same resources. We are getting better quality in surface finishes, more accurate estimates of job time and cost thanks to CAM simulation, and minimal test cuts thanks to Edgecam's checking for inter ferences and collisions." And, Shepherd notes, "we are getting speedy startups of all these new machine tools."