Cnc Gearing Up for Grinding

Gearing up with CNC grinding

In the article Gearing up with CNC grinding (Modern Machine Shop 74.7 (Dec 2001) 72) Mr. Smith explains how his company saved money by doing most of its gear grinding in house. Mr. Smith’s company was also able to reduce cost and save time.  

Mr. Smith owned the company California gear that specializes in producing precision gears. They produced gears for aerospace, medical, oilfield, high performance autos, and other applications. Mr. Smith’s company did all their own gear grinding in house. However, there were still some key steps that he had to send to other companies to have done. The process of ID and OD grinding had to be done outside of the company. “Having to farm out the work stretched our typical 12 to 18 week delivery to as much as 20 to 24 weeks, particularly when our vendors were busy.   We couldn’t do anything with the parts until we got them back from the vendor, and when we got them back, invariably there was some slight error-due mainly to the different operations performed on different machines that transferred into the gear.” (page 1)

With rising prices and longer delays the company decided to start doing the jobs in house. They purchased their first CNC production grinder from United Grinding Technology’s. (Miami’s Burg Ohio). It was a universal machine that could do both ID, OD grinding, and facing all in one single set up. (We could have purchased just an ID machine or and OD machine, but we wanted a more universal machine.) (Page 2) Having their own CNC machine has helped the company cut lead times and improve the quality of the work.
With more companies looking to keep all their work on house GMI is a good example of a company making this work. GMI is a company that likes to run small lots of gears at a time and by doing the work in house on their own CNC machine they are able to do this. Keeping inventory down and production flowing smooth, our big keys in a successful company. GMI is doing this at...