Kings of the mountain

Starting up a job shop during an economic downturn can be a wise move—if a good niche is targeted.

Jeffrey Latchaw already owned two machine shops and was looking to start a third. With his two brothers, Mike and Todd, he launched Time Machine Inc., Polk, Pa., in 1979 and saw it grow into a company that employs about 100 people. Then in 1999, he established Rapid Reaction Inc., Franklin, Pa., with Frank Ditzenberger, the company’s president. Latchaw holds the title of secretary/treasurer.

Courtesy of A. Richter

Joseph Latchaw (left), president/co-owner of QualTech Industries, and Eric Dechant, vice president/co-owner, with the company’s Okuma VTM-120YB 5-axis lathe/machining center.

Fast forward to 2008, when the Great Recession caused a severe slowdown in manufacturing. Eric Dechant worked at Time Machine in the mid-1980s while attending high school and kept in touch with Latchaw even after he moved out of state. Dechant was working as a program manager and specialist for FANUC when Latchaw inquired about what he saw occurring in the industry during his frequent trips.

“I said, ‘What I see is anybody who has big machines is busy,'” Dechant recalled. “But you just didn’t see many job shops with big machines because of the investment and software required and the programming and engineering talent needed to run them.”

As it turned out, Latchaw had a line on a big machine, a new Okuma VTM-120YB. The 5-axis lathe/machining center handles parts up to 60 ” (1.52m) in diameter and has a maximum cutting length of 42.5 ” (1.08m), a B-axis milling head that indexes from -10° to 100° and a C-axis chucking spindle that rotates 360° and indexes at 0.0001° increments, enabling access to five sides of most parts.

He pulled the trigger on the new machine in mid-2009, then purchased a building in Kings Mountain, N.C., later that year to house it—and QualTech Industries Inc. was born.

Joseph Latchaw, Jeffrey’s son, was working in Charlotte, N.C., as a plastics engineer for John Deere at the time and resigned to become president/co-owner of the new job shop. Dechant continued working for FANUC but stayed involved with QualTech and made the jump to parts manufacturing in mid-2012, becoming vice president/co-owner of QualTech.

Mountain High

By 2012, QualTech was already fairly well-established as the go-to source for big part machining. The shop even received an order before it was open for business and still preparing the building. The rehab involved fixing roof leaks, securing doors, tearing out carpeting and otherwise tightening up the building while installing about twice as much air conditioning as needed based on the square footage—because temperature has a bigger impact on large parts than small ones and this would allow better control of these parts and their tolerances.

While at an economic development meeting at Curtiss Wright in nearby Shelby, N.C., with other business owners and executives, Joseph Latchaw discussed QualTech’s capabilities with a plant manager for a motor and drive manufacturer and learned the manager had work for the large machine, because nobody else in the area was able to make the needed motor housing parts. “That really kick-started us,” Latchaw said.

However, he added, QualTech also had to initially no-quote some parts because the B-axis head on the Okuma machine prevented it from accessing features and deep bores in some of the taller parts. To overcome that dilemma, the shop purchased a new Honor Seiki VL-125CM 4-axis turning lathe with C-axis milling capability and a 63 ” (1.60m) turning capacity. “Those two machines really work well together,” Latchaw said.

QualTech continues to machine the motor-related parts, including a variety of hollow cast workpieces that weigh up to a half ton. Latchaw noted there are a dozen or so sizes for these particular parts, but because options vary based on customer requirements—such as the need for additional fans or different temperature sensors that require milling special windows to fit them—up to 300 part programs are required to machine all the variations.

On the high end of massive at QualTech are a matched pair of workpieces that weigh 11,000 lbs. combined and require shedding 2 tons of chips to create a complex bearing housing for large power generation applications. These parts begin as a 36 ” tall × 46 ” OD × 28 ” ID forging. The forging is sawed into two halves, then parting line surfaces and their mounting features are machined on the Honor Seiki machine so the halves can be bolted together to create the bearing housing, which fits around the bearing in its final application. In the next step, the halves are transferred to the Okuma VTM-120YB, where OD features, including complex, tight-tolerance details, are turned and milled in the assembled halves. Total cutting time for each part is up to 70 hours, Dechant pointed out.

Managing Risk

Cutting large parts certainly qualifies as high-risk machining, because scrap would not only waste a lot of preparation and machining time, it would also send a forging that costs in the neighborhood of $40,000 to the recycling bin.

“You can’t have any mess-ups,” Latchaw said. “Everything takes a lot of expertise. At most shops, it doesn’t matter if you throw the first part out, but you can’t throw away one of these huge forgings.”

To make sure “big” mistakes aren’t made, QualTech spends a lot of time planning jobs to make sure the part programs have all the needed information. It provides illustrations for operators that indicate how a part needs to be positioned in the machine, Latchaw explained. “There are double checks and triple checks to ensure the part is oriented correctly to make sure a detail is facing toward the front door, the spindle or a reference so that all features are positioned correctly.”

In addition, because some of the parts are for mission-critical applications, such as in nuclear reactors and mining equipment, QualTech must also meet demanding specifications. Those

include tolerances in the tenths, even for large parts, and flaw-free surfaces. For example, Latchaw noted some mining parts require explosion-proof surfaces and, therefore, can’t have any scratches or other imperfections in their surfaces. Otherwise, miners would be at risk of a catastrophic blast.