Boosting beam production: Inspection Efficiency

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END USER: HITCO Carbon Composites Inc., (800) 421-5444, www.hitco.com. CHALLENGE: Increase productivity when machining composite parts. SOLUTION: A 5-axis machine tool optimized for the process. SOLUTION PROVIDER: Bertsche Engineering Corp., (847) 537-8757, www.bertsche.com

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HITCO Carbon Composites Inc. is one of a handful of manufacturers in the world able to manufacture laid-up, or complex, carbon fiber-reinforced plastic aerospace structural parts and to final machine the parts for direct delivery to “point of use.” As such, The Boeing Co. selected HITCO, Gardena, Calif., as one of the suppliers for CFRP floor beams for the 787 program.

Manufacturing floor beams entails designing and constructing detailed layup tools and using CNC tape laying machines to form the structures, which are then cured in autoclaves. HITCO then saws, edge routes, cuts to length and drills the cured floor beam profiles.

HITCO began by machining prototypes of the floor beams on a large gantry mill, but needed a machine optimized for the process. To produce the beams at the required rate to the specified tolerances, Boeing requested that HITCO purchase a P5 5-axis profile beam milling machine from Bertsche Corp., Buffalo Grove, Ill. That’s because Bertsche Engineering previously built one for another aerospace structural parts manufacturer that was producing floor beams for Boeing, noted Richard Bertsche, company president.

Courtesy of Bertsche Engineering

HITCO machines composite beams on the Bertsche P5 mill.

According to Bertsche, the previously built machine was designed for maximum flexibility but not maximum throughput. “We supplied it with incremental improvements to the original machine,” he said. “It’s hard to call the second machine ‘the second generation,’ but in many ways it was.”