Sometimes it’s about improving the process and sometimes about the tooling choices, recently our own Brandon Sakata and  local Mitsubishi Rep Aram Fundukian teamed up to do both for one of our local mold shops.  The results were amazing.

Application:

One of our local Mold shops has a part with 40 holes per part needing to drill a 4.2mm (.165”)  hole 4.30” deep, a little over 25 X diameter.  Not an easy task to begin with, but then add the material is Vascomax 350, a Ni, Co based alloy on top of it.  The job was running in CT40 Makino machine with thru coolant capability, but only 250PSI of coolant pressure

The Competition:

Another distributor using a company that specializes in drilling Competitor “X”. took the approach that they needed to use 3 drills of varying flute lengths to solve this problem.  Drill lengths were 10X , 20X & 30X diameter.  Ran all of the drill at 1800 RPM with a feed rate of .003 FPR or 5.40” per minute.  Competitor “X” inability of the drill to break the chips required the drill needed a full retract peck stroke to clear chips and keep the drill from breaking.  Total time drilling each hole 96 seconds at a cost of $900 in tooling costs or $22.50 per hole

Our Solution:

We chose to use a Mitsubishi pilot drill and 30X diameter Mitsubishi drill.  Running these tools at 2900 RPM with a feed rate of 8.7 IPM, almost a 40% improvement in penetration rate.  Additionally, we were able to control the chips and eliminated pecking.

Drilling each hole in 29 seconds, with tooling costs of about $330 or $8.25 per hole.

Results:

With the savings in cost per hole on tolling being reduced from competitor “X” of about $22.50 per hole to our $8.25 per hole with Mitsubishi.  Plus the resulting time savings in machine time and labor, valued by our customer at $125 per hour

The net result is a savings of $608.44 per part, with annual estimated savings of $6,084.42

Our Customer chose to stop after 40 holes, even though the drill barely looks used.

This just one example of how working with our suppliers our expert application sales team can tackle all of your tooling and process challenges.

After the success in this single operation, we were invited to review the entire job looking at every operation.  Eventually we reduced each parts run time by 6 hours, instead of producing a single part per day.  With the help of the programmers, machinist and multiple suppliers we are now producing 3 parts per day

If you’re ready for us to work with your team on all aspects of productivity improvement, contact our office 714-956-8665 and ask for your local application expert