Customer-centric cutting: Turning Performance

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END USER: Kluba Machine LLC, (636) 390-4088.
SOLUTION PROVIDER: CNC Software Inc., (800) 228-2877, www.mastercam.com.
CHALLENGE: Improve cycle times and spindle uptime while maintaining part quality.
SOLUTION: CAD/CAM software.

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Kluba Machine LLC has built up a diverse customer base encompassing aerospace, defense, food processing, automotive and agricultural equipment since it opened its doors in November 2012. Each customer has a customized manufacturing process.

The Washington, Mo., job shop makes close-tolerance parts, generally small enough to hold in your hand, on four CNC vertical mills, two of which are 4-axis, and a CNC turning center.

For a new shop to make a go of it in these competitive times, it must keep the usual metrics in mind, such as quality, throughput, cycle times and total cost per part. But for owner Joe Kluba, the metric that weighs the most on his mind is spindle uptime. At a job shop where he used to work, spindle uptime was typically 37 percent, with an occasional surge to 42 percent. Kluba understood he would need to do better than that to compete with shops with mature processes.

Kluba Machine produces close-tolerance parts, with each part having a customized manufacturing process based on the specific needs of the customer. Images courtesy CNC Software.

Kluba spent the first 3½ months running the shop during the day and writing CAM programs at night. During that time, he generated nearly 4,000 programs in Mastercam CAD/CAM software from CNC Software Inc., Tolland, Conn.

“Our mission in those early days was to take the comprehensive tools that were available to us in Mastercam software and break manufacturing processes down on a customer-by-customer basis,” Kluba said. “That way, subsequent programs would only use processes known to work every time, based on the customer’s material, geometry and quality requirements.”