Speed and accuracy island: Trade Shows & Events

According to Dan Schmidt, owner of Zero Hour Parts, Ann Arbor, Mich., his shop is “an island in a sea of automotive shops.” An automotive supplier typically focuses on producing huge volumes of parts and continually squeezing per-part cost, but Schmidt said speed and accuracy are Zero Hour’s priorities. “We do ‘onesies and twosies’ of everything, and a part has to be right the first time,” he said.

Lead times are usually less than a week, sometimes much less. “We’ve got some jobs where they call us in the morning and we ship it out that day,” he said, noting that the shop doesn’t bid on production jobs or those with lead times more than a couple of weeks.

Courtesy of Zero Hour Parts

In 2 days, Zero Hour Parts programmed and machined a single example of this 41 “-long aluminum handle for a prototype refrigerator.

A recent job was a 41 “×3½ “×2½ ” aluminum door handle for a prototype refrigerator. A single example was due in just 2 days.

Zero Hour quoted the part using the customer’s solid model. “One of our core skills is to be able to look at a part and know how long it’s going to run before we ever cut a chip,” Schmidt said. “We have software that I wrote for quoting and scheduling. It is pretty good at predicting, based on size, geometry and data from previous jobs, how long a job will take.”

The handle’s 41 ” length was a critical factor in compiling the quote. At the time, the shop’s largest machine was a Haas VM3 with X-axis and Y-axis travels of 40 ” and 24 “, respectively. Those dimensions yield a diagonal of 46 “, Schmidt said, “so we laid the part out corner to corner.”

Schmidt said because the shop usually machines only one or two parts at a time, “typically it will take just as long to program a part as to run it.” Therefore, “the most critical thing in our success is our four employees,” each of whom is an expert machinist and programmer. Every employee runs several machines and is responsible for a part from beginning to end.

Zero Hour machined the door handle in two operations. The first, for the back side of the handle, began with a 42 “×4 “×3 ” piece of 6061 aluminum. “The first operation was pretty easy because we had a big block of material,” Schmidt said. “We just clamped it in Kurt vises and went at it with a 2 “-dia. Iscar Shredmill.” The cutter, he said, is “our go-to when we need to remove a lot of material.” The shop employed the Rough Pocket utility in its Mastercam CAM software that “blows away any material that is not part of the model. If you were in production, you’d want to optimize every tool and operation, but for our game, the fewest operations and fewest tools possible is the safest way to run, even though it’s not always the most efficient,” Schmidt said.