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The Titanium Success Formula

A Job Shop Finds the Winning Combination
With the right combination of OKK MCH 600 horizontal machining center, Ingersoll cutting tools and smart programming Aerometals was able to increase production of F-15 titanium horizontal stabilizer mounts from 70 to 300 per year and still pay off its new machine in 6 months.

Listening to his new 30 horsepower OKK machine mill titanium like it was mild steel, Mark DeRenne couldn't help but think how it had been only a few short months ago. This was the job that tied up two vertical CNC machines and made operators roll their eyes. For 15 years, Aerometals had been producing these horizontal stabilizer mounts for the F-15. Using two machines, it took almost a full year to produce a standard order of 70 parts.

As the old saying goes, "Necessity is the mother of invention." And in this case, it was no different. Standard orders were increased from 70 to 300-and delivery schedules shortened. As CNC Manager, DeRenne had to take action. The days of allowing tools to grind away at titanium using under-powered machines had come to an end.

Machining Center: DeRenne felt certain a single machining center could handle the job, providing it had the right attributes. It had to have needed strength and power, plus certain other features in order to aggressively mill titanium. After considering different machines he settled on an OKK MCH 600 horizontal machining center from Delta Machine Systems Inc. located in nearby Fremont, CA. The selected system offered 50 Taper with Boxed Ways, 30 hp geared head, coolant through the spindle and a pallet changer with 2 tombstones.

When running the stabilizer mount job, the pallet changer/tombstone combination can handle 16 parts at a time; four parts/four operations on either side of each tombstone with eight parts in the machine at all times.

Tooling: With the OKK machining center specified, DeRenne now needed tooling that could utilize the potential the machine had to offer.

"In order to choose the cutting tools, I needed to consider cutter geometry/attributes, technical support, cutter availability and price. After entertaining three companies, I decided to go with Ingersoll."

DeRenne was already familiar with Ingersoll, since the company had supplied some of the tools for roughing the F-15 part "the old way."

To specify the new tooling needed, Mark met with the Ingersoll sales engineer responsible for technical support at Aerometals. Subsequently Ingersoll proposed a package of eight tools to rough the part.

Results: When the new machining center, programming, tooling and parts all came together, the results were dramatic. The 41 pound parts were reduced to 24 pounds and completely finished in a little more than 40 minutes each. This is based on a cycle of 16 parts taking 13 hours to complete. A total of 17 tools are used.

Once a set of sixteen parts is in process, they are completed without interruption due to a combination of proper tooling selection and smart programming.

"This was a win/win situation for Aerometals and Ingersoll," DeRenne says. "We not only solved our production problems for this part, but also turned it into one of the nicest running jobs in the plant. Better yet, we were able to pay off our new machine within six months."