Turning center is precise to a ‘tee’

END USER: Independent Protection Co. Inc., (574) 533-4116, www.ipclp.com.
CHALLENGE: Bring outsourced parts in-house that were being milled and machine them on a CNC lathe.
SOLUTION: A 6-axis turning center equipped with a bar feeder.
SOLUTION PROVIDERS: Eurotech, (352) 799-5223, www.eurotechelite.com; Superior Equipment Solutions, (937) 704-0357, www.supequipment.com.

Because lightning strikes Earth more than 4.3 million times per day, protection from this form of Mother Nature’s wrath is in great demand. That’s where Independent Protection Co. Inc. enters the picture. The Goshen, Ind., company manufactures high-performance lightning rods and other lightning protection devices and offers system design and layout services, installation assistance and onsite supervision.

IPC also makes parts for transit buses and specialty vehicles for its sister company, Turtle Top, New Paris, Ind. One type of part for those applications is a steel seat track T-nut.

IPC outsourced production, but wanted to bring it in-house to reduce lead times and costs, noted Plant Manager Tony Bradley. He added that the machine shops producing those parts for IPC were running them on milling machines, which requires paying labor to cut the raw workpiece material, load it in a jig, machine the parts while monitoring the machine throughout the day and then unload the finished part from the jig.

Having a shop produce the parts on a bar-fed lathe would alleviate a great deal of operator intervention, but finding a job shop to do that proved problematic. “The companies we talked to did not want to run the steel T-nuts on their CNC lathes as they would not guarantee their machines could run them,” Bradley said.

Courtesy of Independent Protection Co.

Plant Manager Tony Bradley says the Eurotech E42SL-Y turning center enabled IPC bring production of outsourced T-nut parts (inset) in-house and reduced the scrap from about 25 percent to 3 percent.