Spot On: Turning Performance

Tool presetters help three shops boost accuracy, productivity and savings.

Courtesy of Advanced Manufacturing Branch/Goddard Space Flight Center

Bob Taylor, lead technician for high-speed machining at the Advanced Manufacturing Branch/Goddard Space Flight Center, uses the Haimer Tool Dynamic Preset to inspect a 0.1mm-dia., 2-flute endmill.

The timing of the IMTS trade show in Chicago last September couldn’t have been better for Jason Bromiley. As vice president and co-owner of John R. Bromiley Machine Co. Inc., a job shop in Chalfont, Pa., Bromiley has the lead role in company plans to expand into aerospace manufacturing.

Early last fall, the firm already was working on attaining the requisite certification (AS 9100B and ISO 9001:2008). And, as IMTS rolled around, Bromiley was in the market for equipment that would both streamline his shop’s current workload and handle the added rigors of aerospace machining—specifically, tool presetters.

“I wanted something to help with the setups,” said Bromiley. “Being a job shop, our biggest time-consuming factor is multiple setups. We try to adhere to our customers’ requirements and demands; they’ll call us one day and expect us to change setups to get them another hot job that they may not have foreseen, so to accommodate them we usually do more setups than anticipated. [Also,] a lot of the documentation requirements for our AS certificate are preventive, or corrective, actions. So I consider using [a tool presetter] a preventive action, so that we don’t lose customers by not being able to provide their parts on time.”

Courtesy of John R. Bromiley Machine Co.

With the Zoller smile 400/pilot 3.0 presetter in the background, Jason Bromiley (left), vice president John R. Bromiley Machine Co. Inc., and Steve Atlee, toolroom attendant, discuss tooling.

In addition to minimizing setup time, presetters ensure consistent, accurate tool measurements. The potential time and cost savings are numerous—from extended tool life to increased productivity and reduced machine downtime.

High-End Choice

The Bromiley shop houses 25 CNC machines, ranging from a small Swiss-style lathe to larger turning centers with 11-axis capability. The selection also includes five vertical and four horizontal milling centers. Aside from its pursuit of aerospace contracts, the company primarily serves the hydraulic, medical, petrochemical and instrumentation industries.

At IMTS, Bromiley surveyed the presetters on display, eventually deciding on a Zoller smile 400/pilot 3.0 from Zoller Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich. “I purposely bought a higher-end unit for its durability and to be able to maximize what we could [add to it]. I can always add a camera, for example. So I don’t have to worry about buying a new machine in 3 years because of outdated technology.”

Incorporating the technology, which took place over the winter, was seamless, Bromiley said. Zoller provided 2 days of training, “and by the end of the first day my toolcrib attendant had already set up 10 tools, which to me was pretty surprising, considering how uncomputer savvy he claimed to be,” said Bromiley.

Courtesy of Cascade Corp.

Key to Cascade Corp.’s decision to purchase the Speroni STP66 from Big Kaiser was the user-friendly software so that shop personnel, such as Fred Montgomery (shown), can easily operate the presetter.

According to Alexander Zoller, vice president of Zoller, the biggest hurdle shops often face when adding a presetter is the need to adjust their mindset. “Basically, it’s that an external machine is now taking care of the measurements workers previously took,” he said. “They find it difficult to believe that they only have to load the tools, hit a button and run good parts.”

Bromiley said adding a presetter already has resulted in significant cost savings and error-free, quality machining. While it’s currently used only on the company’s nine HMCs and VMCs (expanded applications are planned), he figures it’s saving 18 hours in setup time per week (two hours per machine), which translates to a weekly savings of nearly $1,000. “So my return on investment will be under a year,” Bromiley said. “You don’t buy too many assets that pay themselves off in that short amount of time.”

Also, Bromiley’s milling supervisors endorsed the tool presetter’s working capability. “They both told me that when they punch in the number my toolcrib attendant provides on the tool, it’s dead nuts every time. There’s no guessing as to where the tool sits; it eliminates a lot of possible error on the part of the setup operator.”

And, importantly, the presetter has helped position the company—which earned its AS and ISO certification this past March—to attract more aerospace contracts. “I’m hoping,” said Bromiley, “that [the certification and presetter] will take us to a whole different level of manufacturing—competing to do business for Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and Sikorsky.”

Balancing and Presetting

Upgrading capabilities also played a part in adding presetting technology at the Advanced Manufacturing Branch of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The AMB, though, purchased a novel instrument that combines both presetting and balancing capabilities from Haimer USA LLC, Villa Park, Ill. The decision to buy the hybrid instrument, called the Tool Dynamic Preset, stemmed from a dovetailing of emerging needs.

The AMB is NASA/Goddard’s lead facility for developing “spaceflight hardware components for instruments, solar panels, metallic and composite components and composite structures,” said Matt Showalter, associate branch head of AMB. To more productively handle the workload, 3 years ago the AMB purchased a number of 5-axis, high-speed machining centers. Some of the equipment has spindle speeds from 25,000 rpm to 36,000 rpm. As a result, Showalter also decided to step up the facility’s balancing capabilities.

One of the machining centers, a GF AgieCharmilles Mikron HSM 600V, “has an internal alert system monitoring the spindle that lets you know if your tool is out of balance, but it didn’t tell you how much or where the imbalance was located on the tooling package,” Show- alter said. “So we thought it would be more proactive if we could determine that the tool package was balanced and inspected before it goes into the machine.”

At the same time, AMB was doing more micromachining, and the shortcomings of lasers used to measure the microtool lengths was a growing concern. “When you get down to the width of the focal point of the laser, sometimes we’d see a discrepancy of 0.0005 “,” said Showalter. “Well, when it’s an endmill that tiny and you’ve missed the tool length by even that small of a variance, you’ve overloaded it and you’ll break the tool. So presetting became critical at that point.”