Reunification brings triple advantage to user

In series production of housings, the HC90 shoulder milling cutter machines at extreme cantilever cavities – faster, smoother and with double the tool life

All over the world, there are workpieces that are sometimes insourced and sometimes outsourced, where motivation and objectives often vary. In this case, we are talking about transmission housings for tractors that have migrated from OEM to TIER. Andrea Faravelli, who has been in charge of this project since 2019, has followed the outsource route, this being the nature of a good sales engineer, because he knows: In practice, not all tools are necessarily adopted 1:1 from the predecessor process.

It was the same here. At the first meeting, it turned out that for the two machining operations on the housing base – namely the helical milling of a hole with Ø 34 mm and a depth of 6 mm as well as the machining of two further holes with Ø 57 and Ø 54.5 mm plus a 45° chamfer – the AVANTEC tool is no longer used, but another one instead. The milling quality is satisfactory, but there was still a desire for optimisation. On the one hand, the high noise level was a negative factor, and on the other – as is so often the case – one would like to reduce the unit costs.

Faravelli was basically able to resolve this very easily by implementing the OEM solution in the new horizontal machining center, a Mazak. Instead of, like the competition, using a standard tool with Ø 32 mm, his solution was to use an individual tool with the same hole diameter, namely 34 mm. The 20% extra cost for the „special tool“ is virtually irrelevant because the benefits clearly outweigh the disadvantages in practice.

Of the total machining time of the housing in the 2nd clamping position, the solution with screw-on version of the HC90 shoulder milling cutter saved a good 300 seconds, which significantly reduced the unit costs. Calculated on the annual batch size of 1200 components, that‘s a good 100 hours of machine capacity that can be saved or freed up.

Successful together. CEO Riccardo Lamera, M.E.A SRL with Andrea Faravelli, AVANTEC Italia.

Sometimes it is the case that you mill faster, but this is at the expense of other factors, such as tool life or even quality. For Riccardo Lamera‘s Mazak, „neither-nor!“ applies. The HC90 shoulder milling cutter mills the operations on the horizontal three-axis centre with outstanding smooth, silent running, even with a cantilever of 354 mm. The quality is as required, which is also reflected in the tool life: it is twice as long as before. The reunification of workpiece and tool is successful for both sides. And that‘s how it should be.