Gosiger News

Seattle, Washington-based Lighthouse for the Blind is a not-for-profit that creates employment for blind, deaf, and other individuals challenged by physical disabilities. One of their crowning achievements is a machine shop servicing the aerospace industry. However, when the organization realized that they needed to increase their competitiveness with CNC machining technologies they had difficulty finding a machine tool supplier who would work with them to adapt the new machines for blind operators.

Gosiger Automation recently worked with a manufacturer of rotors used in air compressors that wanted to improve the productivity of its grinding operation. The company was also concerned with employee health and safety issues due to the heavy lifting required of their grinding machine operators.

Gardner Research recently completed an in-depth study of CNC machine shops to better understand what separates high-performance shops – those that excel at income, profit and growth – from average ones. The study found that the characteristics of these higher performing CNC machine shops included gross sales that were 14% higher than other shops, and median net income margin of 12.9% versus 5.9%. Moreover, the average growth rate for high performing CNC machine shops was 51.6% while the other shops averaged only 25.1% growth.

Like any other major purchase, most of us tend to focus on the initial pricetag of manufacturing equipment, and it’s sometimes difficult to rationalize the cost difference between two similar machines. In the case of CNC machine tools, Machining Center “A” may not look much different from Machine Center “B,” and the specs may even be quite close. So, when machine “B” has a pricetag that’s one-third less than “A,” it’s tempting to choose the less expensive machine.

Nick Sluterbeck is the fourth generation to work in his family’s Clayton, Ohio-based business, Sluterbeck Tool Co. Started by Nick’s great-grandfather in the 2-car garage of his home in 1953, the versatile tool & die company now occupies a modern, 12,000 square foot facility. Here they turn out one-offs, prototypes and full production runs of a variety of parts for automotive, medical and specialty machine OEMs.

A CNC machine shop in the Midwest (they’ve asked to remain anonymous) runs batches of 500 – 6,000 parts for a variety of metalworking customers. One of their specialties is precision grinding of multi-faceted cylindrical parts. When they sought to add capacity to their grinding operation, they evaluated various products and settled on an Okuma GA26 grinder. To maximize productivity, Gosiger Automation designed a solution that includes the Okuma grinder, Fanuc LR-Mate robots, a palletized loading system and centralized control.

Many energy providers are turning to the process of well fracturing which is good news for CNC shops like Premium Frac Pumps in Fort Worth, Texas. The company makes a line of well fracturing pumps that are critical to this process.

RFM, a unit of Mitsubishi Materials USA, manufactures indexable, multi-pocketed milling cutters, end mills and drills. The Brighton, Michigan facility quadrupled its annual sales and increased production output 25% by applying Gosiger Factory Automation technologies to its machining processes.

Morbark, Inc. is the industry leader in heavy-duty wood harvesting equipment known for performance and reliability. So Central Machine Shop Director, Joe Faber wasn’t about to settle for anything less in his CNC machines.

“When we were ready to add some new CNC machines we looked at all of the options and were most impressed with the Gosiger organization’s thorough knowledge of manufacturing and the capabilities of the Okuma products. We checked with other manufacturers who had switched to Okuma CNC machines from Gosiger. Everyone we spoke with beat the drum for the quality of the Okuma products and the technical support and service from Gosiger.” As a result, Morbark now has two Okuma horizontal machining centers and an Okuma vertical mill.

Bill Goodman, President of Inland Tool & Manufacturing, Inc., saw little opportunity to benefit from factory automation. “Along with our production stamping and light assembly businesses, we produce individual prototypes and tooling, or small batches of parts in our machining operations,” he explains, “So automation really hasn’t been much of an issue.”

Things changed, however, when Inland began making production runs of a family of parts for heavy-duty cable clamps used on slings attached to derricks for loading and unloading freight, and in the lumber industry. That’s when they decided to investigate how applying factory automation to this repetitive process might save them time and reduce labor costs. They chose an Okuma Captain L-370MWBB CNC lathe as the centerpiece and worked with Gosiger Factory Automation to create a cell that integrated an LNS Quick Load Servo 80 bar feeder, inbound and outbound parts conveyors, and a Fanuc M-6iB/6S robot to handle parts.