Product category:
Cutting and Profiling Subcontracting Services
News Release from: Clamason Industries
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 25 April 2006
Subcontracting capability fit for
purpose
Clamason's company philosophy is to purchase whatever tonnage or type of machinery may be required for the operations on new contracts as they arise.
Manufacturing and QA facilities at Clamason's Kingswinford site include the following plant and equipment resources, although the company philosophy is to purchase whatever tonnage or type of machinery may be required for the operations on new contracts as they arise Clamason Industries uses the manufacturing software system EFAC
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 1 Mar 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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Subcontract product design and development companies are expected to run the same design software as the end customer.
Clamason collaborates with designers and toolmakers whether they may be based locally or on the other side of the world.
Tooling manufacture is all subcontracted out, although tool maintenance (for example, to offset wear over the life of a tool) is conducted entirely in-house at Clamason.
Further reading
Cutting edge technology developed for the kitchen
Subcontract presswork and fabrication company solved the problem of how to easily cut plastics cling film or aluminium foil from a roll purchased for either commercial or domestic catering.
Window components from stainless steel
Clamason is currently manufacturing 2.5 million per year of a component for Securistyle, which is produced in pairs for the top and bottom of a window.
Eddy current detector solves presswork problem
Eddy current sensors, located within a press tool, measure the gap between stripper face and die in the closed position to detect pierced slugs, which otherwise might stick in the strip.
The company operates a SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Die) system, for which tools are kept adjacent to their press.
To view customers' design proposals as well as modifications proposed by its outside toolmakers, Clamason is able to translate incoming 3D CAD drawings supplied in whatever format by means of the Rhinoceros system from Seattle.
Meanwhile Webex allows Clamason to indicate particular areas on a drawing or document to other users in real time, while talking on the phone using an integrated audio link.
Pressed components can be made to as exact a tolerance as 50 microns and in as little as one-tenth of a second.
90% of Clamason pressings are less than 2mm thick.
Majoring on technically complex parts in medium to high volumes, annual order quantities per part can range from 25,000 up to 200 million, although an average call-off would lie between 50,000 and 250,000 per year.
Clamason uses its experience and expertise to propose the optimum metal solution for the project and the application.
Individual pressings can be produced from materials ranging from cold-rolled and stainless steels to copper based alloys, aluminium and bimetallic combinations - selecting from hundreds if not thousands of grades to comply with the characteristics required and conditions of use specified.
A metal may of course be specified for its cost, weight, mechanical and physical properties, shelf life, recyclability and so forth.
(Clamason itself sells £300,000 of waste metals for recycling per year, separated by type into different bins.) Mechanical properties will encompass tensile strength, yield strength, impact strength, elongation, shear strength, Brinell hardness and fatigue strength, whilst physical properties embrace melting range, density, electrical conductivity and the coefficients of thermal expansion and thermal conductivity.
Increasingly complex packaging logistics has become of vital importance to comply with the Kanban or Just-in-Time requirements of many customers.
In such cases, batches of pressings can be despatched only in approved and branded plastic boxes, on plastic spools, in polybags or cardboard cartons with foam cushioning as specified.
"5S" quality disciplines are applied throughout the shopfloor - "a place for everything and everything in its place", with a strong emphasis on regular attention to the cleanliness and tidiness of working areas.
Clamason operates a Chin Fong Worcester transfer press line of six presses located together, with rapid transfer of the pressing between stations by pick-and-place robots.
This system allows the manufacture of highly complex parts with no carry strip and the automatic insertion of other components (such as other precision pressings, machined parts, zinc, aluminium or magnesium diecastings, or even plastic mouldings) and has the facility to reverse the burr side automatically within the process.
Vehicle applications for this line include engine management unit (EMU) covers, airbag housings and GPS antennae, but it now proves ideal for manufacturing domestic ladder platforms too! The two largest presses (a Chin Fong Stamtec Worcester press of 250 tonnes and Weingarten press of 200 tonnes) with beds up to 2.5m long allow the manufacture of pressings requiring thicker materials, multiple stages, deep draw or a combination of all three.
Typical applications are: car audio casings, PC shields and curtain, thorax, driver and knee airbag housings.
Chin Fong is Taiwan's biggest press manufacturer, whilst Muller Weingarten AG of Germany has established a reputation as the largest manufacturer of hydraulic presses for the automotive industry.
Presses from 50 to 150 tonnes of various brands and sizes with running speeds up to 400 blows per minute.
Ideal for thinner gauge material and tightly toleranced parts.
Applications include power distribution, metering and switching, or domestic uses such as window hardware, electrical products and televisions.
15 Froude Engineering, cam-driven, four-slide machines - specialist machines of lower tonnage with the ability to form and manipulate metal as well as cut it.
Highly complex components are manufactured from strip the exact width of the part or from wire form material, with low-cost tooling.
Typical applications include tiny medical pressings, PCB's, electronic and electrical contacts, and tie-down loops for automotive uses.
The particularly ingenious Bihler automatic punching and forming machine for high-volume batch production originated from Germany.
Clamason uses it for manufacturing long runs of small and highly complicated forms such as brush boxes for electric motors, jubilee clips and clips for holding wiring looms and electrical conduit.
By bending pressings, the machine can achieve more complex shapes than are possible from a standard four-slide process.
With four cams for bending, this machine will cut and form pull rings and hoops.
So it is ideal for producing vehicle fastening hardware such as welded tie-down loops for luggage in car boots.
A three-axis, plc-controlled, robotic spot welding facility from Staubli Unimation.
Applications include passenger airbag housings and the assembly of in-car entertainment (ICE) products.
A £40,000 Simac Masic 3D realtime vision system measures and monitors in 3D 100% of thin and intricate healthcare components fed in a continuous strip and requiring measurement of four key features to a 50-micron tolerance.
The strip feeds from Clamason's new, state-of-the-art, £200,000 Bruderer press that runs in a dedicated cell at high speeds of up to 800 blows per minute.
The 25-tonne, PLC-controlled, Bruderer BSTA Series press has a bed length of 750mm and features quick-change tooling for JIT manufacture.
The close co-operation at all stages between the three companies Clamason Industries, Bruderer UK and Simac Masic has provided an exemplary engineering solution which exceeds the pharmaceutical customer's stringent quality requirements.
Other shopfloor plant integral to the process includes a Rosler deburring station for removing burrs and sharp edges with stone media as well as computer-controlled degreasing baths.
The operator alters the media in the Rosler depending upon the shape of the part being processed.
The Aqua Degreaser consist of four tanks - for cleaning, primary rinse, secondary rinse and drying.
In addition there is a Tampo screen printing machine from Kent International in the Printing Room.
This equipment is typically used to print model identities and functional details on the rear panel of CCTV camera casings, from artwork supplied by the customer.
Among the quality assurance systems in the Metrology Department at Clamason, a Nikon Nexiv 3020 non-contact, CNC video measuring system featuring a through-the-lens laser autofocus facility ensures the repeatability of small, complex and highly toleranced parts from large batch production.
The system typically measures 60 sample pressings from a 30,000 batch in three axes, X, Y and Z, against a program written either from a customer's CAD model or using a reference component.
Lots of 30 are placed on a jig made by Clamason itself, and the Nexiv measures the programmed dimensions in a few moments using automatic component recognition.
The progressive data generated is stored in the Nikon Nexiv's data management system for quality audit and exported as an Excel spreadsheet for analysis.
Exported data can be put into capability and SPC charts.
Such identification and monitoring of trends in key features are vital in enabling Clamason to anticipate when and where adjustments need to be made to the process, well before a dimension moves out of tolerance.
Two typical examples would be to compensate for tool wear, especially when processing hard stainless steels, and for variations in the mechanical and chemical properties of raw material from coil to coil.
Quality of product continues to keep Clamason competitive in world markets where the cost of quality is increasingly regarded as a major element in component price.
The Metrology Department also operates a hardness tester and a £60,000 Brown and Sharpe Mistral CNC co-ordinate measuring machine, with a Renishaw PH10M contact probe, for the checking of high-tolerance parts with complex 3D forms and the preparation of associated reports.
This machine utilises PC-DMIS for Windows software for reading data and is regularly used for measuring and recording points on say complex airbag inflator housings (four per car - two nearside and two offside) as well as on all kinds of prototype components.
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