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Third
Quarter - July 2004 |
TD Coating Boosts Die Life by 30X
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A
300 ton press performing progressive die applications...one
of 100 different presses used at Okay Industries. |
As a precision
stamper, Okay Industries (New Britain, CT) likes to take on the
tough jobs.
Okay Industries
has been in the stamping business for 35 years. Their facility has
100,000 sq. ft. and 120 employees. Jim DeVecchis, Design Engineer
said “We have a complete die production tool room with 22
toolmakers and a full complement of machine tools, as well as precision
Quality Control instrumentation to suit any measurement criteria
the customer may have.”
Okay serves
several diverse market segments including medical, automotive, electronics,
defense and specialty industrial.
An Early Challenge
DeVecchis remarked,
“The first job that I worked on as a project manager
was to assemble stamped surgical blades. The material is 302 stainless
steel, in a strip that is 0.007” thick. To feed his machine,
we use a hitch feed mechanism. Pawls are spring loaded from the
top and they drag on pilot holes in the strip. The stainless steel
rapidly wore out the pawls. Solid-carbide pawls would hold up for
a while, but unfortunately they would begin
to pit and needed to be redressed often. Pawls made of CPM 10V material
did not hold up either. “We
tried everything and nothing would hold up longer than a few days,
which led to high downtime costs."
One of Okay’s
engineers decided to send two sets of pawls to the TD Center to
have them coated with the thermal diffusion (TD) process. These
two sets lasted seven months compared to only five days without
the (TD) process.
“Now
that we’ve been working with the process for several years,
we know that the capabilities of the TD process are endless.
We are always experimenting with it to get greater die life and
less heat build up in our draw
dies.”
For more on
OKAY Industries and other examples go to: Success Stories.
| Manufacturing
Finally Rebounding
April
U.S. machine tool consumption totaled $211.03 million, according
to AMT - The Association For Manufacturing Technology and
AMTDA, the American Machine Tool Distributor’ Association.
This total was down 25.5% from March but up 45.2% from the
total of $145.30 million reported for April 2003. With a year-to-date
total of $829.80 million, 2004 is up 46.2% compared with 2003.
John
B. Byrd III, President, AMT, said, "March was the best
month the market has posted since March 2001, the market is
running 46 percent ahead of 2003, and we expect the news to
only get better!"
Though
volatile month to month, year-over-year growth in shipments
has accelerated in a surprisingly steady fashion since August.
The US Census Bureau released its quarterly report June 14,
2004, revealing that manufacturing had showed steady gains
in the first quarter of 2004. Sales in all manufacturing grew
4.5%
compared to fourth quarter 2003, and durable goods sales increased
5.6%.
Manufacturing
employment grew by 32,000 in May. Since January, manufacturing
has added 91,000 jobs, mostly in its durable goods component.
Although employment has been slow to grow during rising manufacturing
activity, the trend began to reverse in November 2003 in durable
goods manufacturing and in December 2003 for manufacturing
as a whole. |
New
Sales Agency
The TD Center is proud to announce that H.S.A. Manufacturing Solutions
will be representing TD Center coatings in Indiana and Southern
Ohio beginning in July. The company has three partners, Tim
Swinney is located in Carmel Indiana and will handle Central
Indiana and Southern Ohio. Jeff Roberts works in Northern
Indiana and Larry Sewell will handle Southern Indiana from
his home in Louisville. They bring a wealth of manufacturing
experience and knowledge to the TD Center customers in Indiana,
having sold stamped metal products and assemblies for over
55 years. Other products represented by H.S.A. include turned
parts, springs and industrial fasteners. You can contact Larry,
Jeff or Tim through our website or by phone at
317- 846-4562.
|
Lead-Time
Update
Lead-time continues
to be our main focus as well as our biggest challenge. We have experienced
50%+ growth in our business over the last couple of months. Our
lead-time performance has shown only minor erosion in light of this
significant upswing in our business. However, we realize that we
need to show improvements to lead-time, even during periods of high
volume. Therefore, we are diligently pursuing improvements that
you demand and deserve. To address this up tick in lead-time, we
have added additional labor to our polishing area and continue to
pursue incremental improvements across our business. We have several
initiatives underway, including further refinements to our post
hardening process, automated order processing and pricing, preventive
maintenance, etc. The result should be progress in the form of lower
lead-times in the coming months. Stay tuned!
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