Plowing Ahead with Quick-Change Towers

The machining operations for these manifolds include face milling, drilling, tapping, thread milling and hydraulic porting. The company did these with two twin-pallet Mori Seiki NH-400 high precision machining centers using its dedicated fixture setup.

While Western Products was satisfied with the machining centers performance, they questioned the growing amount of setup time as the manifold mix grew. Kurt engineers presented drawings of a new ClusterTower setup using custom jaws, and the proposal Dulmes and the team of engineers made seemed ideal.

Kurt’s professional approach and years of experience solving hundreds of challenging high density workholding setups were enough to convince Western that it would provide the rigid workholding they required and a more efficient setup process.

One set of custom jaws the engineers proposed handles the first series of machining operations on the extruded workpiece blanks. When complete, the parts are reversed on another special set of jaws for a second series of machining operations. Several of the machined part features from the first series of operations are used to correctly position the workpieces for the second series of machining operations.

“With the new setup, we’re clamping at 3000 to 3100 PSI which is more than adequate pressure to hold the parts rigidly for the tightest tolerances and no part vibration”, reports Thoreson. “Originally, we were concerned that a standard tower setup like this would not be rigid enough to get top speed and accuracy, but we quickly found those never became issues.”

With a maximum spindle speed of 15,000 rpm, the firm was able to operate the machines near top speed with low vibration, good acceleration and without rotary drive backlash. One of the reasons for the rigidity is that the ClusterTowers are precision machined from 80,000 psi ductile iron. This robust design gives the clamping modules the extra rigidity needed to achieve workpiece immobility while dampening any cutter induced vibration.

“To change setups now we just unsnap the jaws, adjust the vise opening for the new part by hand and we’re ready to pressurize and run new parts,” reports Thoreson. “The old dedicated setup required milling holding slots into each workpiece. We don’t have to mill those slots with the new tower setup. Also, we machine two different manifolds at the same time on the same machine. We do this on two, eight-hour shifts, something we weren’t able to do before. We machine approximately 480 manifolds most weeks, 240 of each size. Even with these quantities, we are able to eliminate the use of a second machine freeing it up for other work.”

He continues, “We run this new setup as aggressively as possible with highest feed rates because the ClusterTowers can take it. We don’t have to worry about vibration or chatter because the ductile iron vise bodies dampen any tendency to vibrate when aggressive operations are called for. Besides being much faster than the previous setup, the machine operator’s time is better utilized allowing for other tasks”.

Western Products, 7777 North 73rd Street, Milwaukee, WI 53223, 877-888-9215, bthoreson@westernplows.com, www.westernplows.com.

Kurt Manufacturing Company, Industrial Products Division, 9445 East River Road NW, Minneapolis, MN 55433, 877-226-7823, workholding@kurt.com, www.kurtworkholding.com.