Provide a service, then make the part: the way this shop serves its customers brings in machining work by design

Modern Machine Shop, June, 2004 by Peter Zelinski

Other disciplines the shop had to develop related to quality. Though the shop built a reputation on its ability to deliver close-tolerance work (one batch of precision parts was necessary for a NASA mission), the ability to deliver the same quality work again and again proved to be a challenge of a different sort. After some early missteps that the shop was quick to address, the company worked out procedures aimed at keeping its quality not only high, but also consistent.

Machine Requirements

Maintaining consistency in close-tolerance work was what drove the shop to purchase its first CNC machine, a chucker lathe from Fortune International of Somerset, New Jersey. The customer sending work to China was prepared to give MasterWorks an order for a small and very precise CNC-turned part that the customer would order again in small batches on a recurring basis. This part didn't call for milling or cross work, so no Swiss-type or multitasking lathe was needed. However, it did require nearly all of its features to meet tolerances of a few ten-thousandths of an inch. MasterWorks' requirements for a CNC lathe to do this work included: 1) sufficient repeatability to make it easy to produce this part consistently; 2) a small footprint, to make it easy to fit the machine in the shop; and 3) service technicians located no farther from the shop than 2 hours' drive away.

For a time, this lathe was the only CNC machine in the shop. Mr. Armfield now acknowledges that this period of time went on too long. For milling and drilling work, the shop relied on knee mills offering simple programmability through digital readouts. But those machines cost the company money by virtue of the productivity the shop lost by not having a machining center available.

The machining center the shop finally did purchase came from Milltronics Manufacturing Co. of Waconia, Minnesota. Even when the price of this machine is combined with that of CAM software for programming it, Mr. Armfield says, the cost is cheap relative to the extra output it delivers over the more basic equipment.

These machines have allowed the shop take on other jobs that are poor candidates for foreign outsourcing. In general, these jobs involve closer-tolerance parts that are ordered in quantities of hundreds or thousands per year, not tens of thousands.

But frequently enough, the machines are simply used to run one-time orders at small prices whose chief value is to keep alive a relationship that might lead to further engineering work. The shop's most rewarding machining relates to parts that are made from the company's own designs.

The computer safes provide a striking example. Today, there is a 9-month backlog of orders for the modified and/or custom-designed safe models. Such a backlog is a far cry from the 2- or 3-week buffer that is typical of the shop's more traditional contract machining.

COMPETITIVE SUCCESS

This shop gets involved early. Providing engineering services first gives the shop an edge when it comes to winning any related production work.