Delta Hi-Tech completes complex parts in single setups on Index G200 machines.
Delta Hi-Tech's bread and butter has always been large volume manufacturing. The shop constantly finds ways to make parts faster and faster, so it easily handles jobs with as few as two or three pieces as well as it does jobs with more than half a million pieces. According to Joe Ostrowsky, president of Delta Hi-Tech ( www.deltahi-tech.com), the shop's manufacturing speed hinges on machining parts in one operation on multitasking modular millturn machines.The shop runs five Index (www.index-usa.com) Y-B-axis G200 machines with spindlethrough bar capacities of 2 in., two Index G200 compacts without Y or B axes, and two Traub TNL26 CNC Swiss fixed and sliding headstock machines that put as many as four tools in the cut at once. The Y-Baxis G200 machines each feature two turrets that hold as many as 32 live tools, allowing for two tools in the cut at all times. That reduces cycle times. The Index machines, which are part of the RatioLine series, also are equipped with barfeeders and gantry or creepertype part pick-ups for eliminating manual unloading.
Juan Carlos Casarrubias, CNC programmer and department manager, indicated that one of the major benefits of the Index machines is that he can set them up outside the machine without interrupting the job that is running. This saves the shop a lot of time and lets it quickly shift to new jobs. "We preset tools and put in the geometries, reducing 50 percent of the typical setup time,"he said. "Then we just have to change guide bushings."
The Index and Traub machines further reduce cycle times and increase production by completing parts in single setups at Delta HiTech. For example, the machines reduced cycle times from about 9 min to 1 min. for brass fiber optic lens components and from 12 min to 6 min for a tiny 416 stainless steel medical part.
Delta Hi-Tech previously produced the lens components on a 4-axis machining center. The machining center operation took an average of 5 min per part. Then, the part had to be moved to another machine for a secondary operation. The move took two minutes, and the secondary operation itself added another two minutes. The shop now runs the parts on its two TNL26s and three G200s, eliminating the move to a second machine, and maintaining a single setup.
For the medical part, the shop uses 27 driven tools on its G200. That machine also completes the parts in one setup. "The machines are so well made and so flexible that we were able to refine tooling and the process to really use the machine's capabilities," said Juan Carlos. While the Index machine's library of driven tools was enough for him to work with, he also added spindle speed multipliers to the tools and ramped up spindle speed from 6,000 rpm to 18,000 rpm on a driven tool to drill a 0.015-in.-diameter hole in the medical parts.
