“We start by identifying candidates that possess an aptitude for becoming a machinist,” says Mr. Danos. ”We follow that up with a comprehensive approach to training, but it’s equally important that we have the most durable machines possible. When you’re dealing with new machinists, it“s a given that there will be programming mistakes from time to time. We need machines that can take a bit of a beating without losing accuracy or resulting in machine down time. We get that from Mori Seiki.”
“The NL2500 has definitely justified its purchase,” says Jeff Kulinski, Lead Machinist in Kinetic’s lathe department. “We’ve experienced marked reduction of cost on the jobs switched over to the machine. The overall rigidity of the machine, coupled with strong performance by the live tooling, provides real cost-savings to our operations.”
“On two four-axis verticals, total cycle time for a set would be just under 65 hours. Once we put this job on the pallet system, our cycle time dropped to 26.8 hours. That’s a typical level of reduction we see when we switch a job to the Mori Seiki machines and pallet pools.”
“Some companies are basically assemblers, ordering parts, putting them together and then selling a product,” says Bill Solarek, Crown’s manager of advanced manufacturing engineering. “However, we rely on an innovative workforce to determine the most appropriate way to machine our parts. We have discovered the advantages of internally producing the parts we need.”
“It’s easy for us to switch job over if, for instance, we are in the middle of running an engine head and a customer brings in a bike with an urgent problem that requires components we don’t have in stock. We unload the current job, load the new one, call up the program, and the machines run without us having to really touch anything.”
