To the max: General Industry Coverage

Courtesy of U.S. Army

Courtesy of Maximum Industries

The U.S. Army’s MRAP vehicles feature V-shaped hulls to divert blasts away from the cab. Maximum Industries machined a key part for the MRAP vehicle (above). Maximum Industries has five waterjet cutters (below), including a 90,000-psi machine with a 5-axis system.

Texas shop’s waterjet cutting capabilities help protect U.S. soldiers.

An abandoned soccer ball, half deflated, sits on an Iraqi roadside; farther on, an 8 ” pile of flat, gray rocks, stacked in studied disarray, hugs the curb; up at the junction, on the right, a four-legged carcass lies beneath a thin cover of dirt and sand. All seemingly innocuous, but potentially deadly objects.

In 2007, camouflaged roadside improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and those borne by vehicles and suicide bombers accounted for 70 percent of U.S. casualties in Iraq. U.S. Army Humvees, with their wide, flat bottoms a mere 16 ” off the ground, were especially vulnerable to IEDs. To remedy the problem, the Pentagon ordered that the Humvees be replaced with Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, featuring composite hulls with ¼ “-thick armor plate bonded to ½ ” of Kevlar and 0.0060 ” of steel. With 30 ” of ground clearance, the V-shaped bottom diverts explosives.

Solving Problems

As with any newly designed product, the MRAP contracts called on truck builders and their suppliers to adapt their manufacturing processes and, in some cases, tackle unanticipated challenges. When one of those challenges arrived at the doorstep of Maximum Industries Inc., Irving, Texas, the company had already established itself as a shop committed to using the latest manufacturing technology to remedy knotty problems.

Founded in 1996 in a 6,000-sq.-ft. plant with three employees, Maximum today has 23 people working in a 44,000-sq.-ft. building. While a sizable portion of the company’s work involves waterjet and laser cutting, it also provides routing and milling, laser marking and engraving, welding, kitting and product design.

“We started out with two CNC waterjet machines and one small laser capable of cutting plastic and other nonmetals,” said Rodie Woodard, owner of Maximum Industries. In addition to four cutting lasers and a variety of machining centers, the company’s waterjet equipment includes four Gold Series gantries from Romeo Engineering Inc., Fort Worth, Texas, with work envelopes of 4 ‘×8 ‘, 6 ‘×10 ‘, 6 ‘×12 ‘ and 8 ‘×14 ‘. Each of the machines has a 50-hp, 60,000-psi SLV intensifier from KMT Waterjet Systems, Baxter Springs, Kansas. The intensifiers are headered together into a manifold system designed and installed by Maximum Industries. “More recently, we’ve added a fifth intensifier, a 125-hp, 90,000-psi KMT waterjet intensifier,” Woodard said. “That machine is integrated with one of our gantries that we’re upgrading to a 3-axis machine. This modification and upgrade will diversify our family of motion systems to three 2-axis systems, one 3-axis system and one 5-axis system.”

Quality and Technology

Maximum’s commitment to incorporating the latest waterjet cutting technology, along with continually meeting new quality standards—including AS 9100 and ISO 9001—have allowed the company to provide sophisticated waterjet cutting services to a widening range of markets, including the oil and gas, medical, semiconductor, aerospace and defense industries.

By early 2008, when Maximum took on a project modifying MRAP vehicle cab floorboards, it could call on a range of waterjet cutting resources and expertise. Still, the project proved to be among the most challenging in the company’s history, according to Woodard.

The original cab floorboards were contracted with an Israeli company that unfortunately shipped 500 formed assemblies to the U.S. with an incorrect hole pattern for mounting the seats.

“It was impractical to crate them to ship back to Israel, so we were asked to make six additional holes in each floorboard,” Woodard said. “It was a challenging application because the material was already formed with different materials bonded together, and it wasn’t flat.”

Milling or laser cutting the layered Kevlar and armor plate wasn’t feasible. “Each material requires different parameters and tooling to machine the holes,” said Woodard. “Laser cutting composite materials of this thickness does not work well at all. However, an abrasive waterjet easily cuts layered material with different materials.”

The key challenges were lifting and placing each 80 “-square, 750-lb. floorboard in a work cell, fixturing the devices and locating the six 1 “-square holes that needed to be cut in each part.

Each part was lifted with nylon strapping that hooked into fabricated lifting eyes on the assembly. Forklift extensions were used to lift the assemblies over a waterjet work cell. Because the floorboards were formed in the shape of a truck floorboard, Maximum had to remove the flat grating at the top of its 36 “-deep waterjet tank. That way, the height of the bridge, where the cutting head is, could be positioned over the section of the subassembly to be cut.

Custom Workholding