When you’re a supplier for the defense aircraft and space industries, there’s no such thing as a bad day. Parts must meet exacting standards and the slightest error could mean tragedy. Tell Tool thrives on that kind of pressure. The company manufactures an array of parts, from small gauges used on NASA’s space suits to large fuel control housing components used in Boeing 747 engines. All of these heavily engineered, intricate parts have anywhere from five to 5,000 unique compound angles or characteristics.

When Tell Tool’s customers switched from specifying castings and forgings to requiring parts machined directly from solid aluminum billet, delivering those exacting parts became even more challenging. Tell Tool upgraded its machining technology with three Makino A77 horizontal machining centers and a modular machining complex to stay on top of the stiff competition among the niche aerospace and defense part suppliers in the country.

“Off-the-shelf tooling simply cannot make the complex cuts we rely on to manufacture these aircraft engine components,” says Bob Morin, Tell Tool’s vice president of manufacturing and operations. “We have created a library of more than 20,000 tools to machine the hydraulic actuators, fuel controls, hydraulic manifold control systems and pumps we make. At least 60 percent of the tooling in these applications is custom.”

During Tell Tool’s upgrade, the manufacturing team realized the benefits that material handling technology and automation would bring. The shop quickly proved out its approach with one part: a fuel control housing for a Cessna Citation Bravo. This unforgiving part resembles an uneven block of Swiss cheese, with multiple surfaces, compound angles and an array of holes throughout. But team members like Tony Roda eagerly accept the challenge.

“A manufacturing engineer orchestrates the entire process,” says Roda, a Tell Tool senior process engineer. “Once the tools and the machines that will support each job are specified, we turn customer prints into a solid model.”

“We aim for a zero-defect part program,” says Jeff Pease, a Tell Tool senior N/C programmer. “So we send every part program through a computer simulation to ensure its quality and accuracy. This lets us optimize designs for manufacturability, automatically generate a CNC toolpath from the surface model and verify that the toolpath is correct before cutting chips.”

Tell Tool’s award-winning quality system also involves the operator in the inspection of many part dimensions. “The tighter the tolerance, the more often it is inspected,” says Pease. “After manufacturing we can pinpoint when each part was machined and other details in case anything needs to be checked.”

Combine that accuracy with the increased throughput provided by the combination of high-speed machining, tombstones and lights-out operations and you’ve got Tell Tool’s recipe for success. “Increased throughput with less lead time reduces our inventory and increases our cash flow,” says Morin. “This is a powerful equation and a competitive advantage.”

For more information about Tell Tool’s high-speed machining solution,
visit www.radical-departures.net/innovation.

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