Shapers. Few metalworkers today could even spot one in a machinery museum, let alone operate one. Perrin G. March could. In 1898, he and a group of enterprising engineers founded the Cincinnati Shaper Co., not far down the road from another well-known – but now defunct – machine tool builder, Lodge and Shipley. As its name suggests, March’s company designed and built machinery that “shaped” metal components – making part surfaces flat, carving grooves and keyways, and, given the right cutting tool, generating intricate features.
What is now Cincinnati Inc. (CI) has since evolved to more modern, computer-controlled offerings, yet its legacy of excellent product quality and customer service lives on. Its 60,000-plus machine tool installations include fiber laser cutting systems, press brakes and shears, not to mention the programming software and automation needed to increase productivity.
This level of equipment diversity means that CI must not only service and support a broad customer base, some operating decades-old equipment together with the latest and greatest, but also make certain their customers understand how to run it effectively. More on this to come.
Pressing forward
There is a line of CI equipment that is upping the game for many high-volume manufacturers, but one that even lower production shops should give more consideration: powder metal (PM) presses. John Reynolds, service and sales manager for the PM press line, has a great deal to say about it, especially considering that its history began around the time he was born.
“We have machines in our compacting line that go all the way back to 1957,” Reynolds notes. “That said, there are only a few left, and they’re primarily used for making oil pans, door panels and even panels for race cars, so they’re significantly different than our current line of PM presses.”
He explains that these Cold War-era machines were primarily mechanical, driven by an electric motor, connecting rods and a gearbox. The shift to belt-driven and then hydraulic equipment began in the early 1980s, when CI acquired the patents from a different machine manufacturer and immediately set about expanding on and improving the offering.
“The result of those advancements are machines called restrike presses,” Reynolds says, “which are used for sizing and coining operations in PM parts.”
Restrike while hot
The PM process is multi-faceted. Depending on the finished part’s application and tolerance requirements, multiple operations and manufacturing steps might be needed to achieve the desired dimensions. Without going into great details, here is the fairly straightforward Reader’s Digest version:
Metals such as iron, steel, titanium, aluminum, copper and so on are mechanically milled or atomized into tiny bits using gas, water or plasma technology, producing powder roughly the consistency of fine sand or talcum powder (not unlike that used in additive manufacturing, or 3-D printing).
A precise amount of PM is placed into a single or multi-stage die that has been electrical discharge machined or hard milled into a mirror image of the target workpiece (minus any finishing work afterward). A ram within the PM press then compacts the material, gradually molding it into a “green” part.
This unfinished part, which “you can easily break with your hands,” is then ejected from the die before being placed into a 900- to 1,300-degree F furnace, just below the PM’s melting point. The high heat fuses the particles, making the part approximately 75 to 80 percent solid relative to rolled or cast materials.
Depending on the specifications, parts can often go right straight from the furnace to the assembly line, where they might end up in everything from a sewing machine to vehicle transmission. Others require finish machining of some kind, such as grinding, milling, surface treatment or all of the above.
Some parts, however, need no finishing. Instead, they can be brought to their final dimensions via a quick, hard hit with the ram after sintering, instantly correcting any warpage or growth that may have occurred in the die. As Reynolds mentioned earlier, this is known as the restrike process.
“Whether restriking is needed or not, the PM process gives companies the opportunity to manufacture products a whole lot cheaper than the alternatives,” he says.
Beyond the strike
There is much more to the PM story than restriking. Multiple types of compacting machines are available, as are different ways of designing the die needed to make the green part. Some compacting machines are pneumatic, where the different die levels are lifted by air and forced into the ram above. Others use a rotating gear train to push the ram downward to form the part. Still others are largely hydraulic but rely on mechanical devices to manipulate the PM within the die.
“This last model is one of our most popular machine designs,” Reynolds says. “For example, we often see them used by automotive manufacturers to deliver parts directly to the assembly area, such as valve guides for the engine or timing belt gears. But the machines are also used a lot for products like lithium batteries, which are produced for commercial and military applications – PM parts are everywhere.”
Not only are there multiple styles of compacting machines available – the Parts Maker, Power Die Change, Fast Set-Up and Rigid Restrike among them – but numerous control styles are available, as well. Earlier controls employed what is referred to as a modular computer, where one circuit board serves as the brain, another performs the mathematical functions and an I/O module controls which machine component receives the electrical signals.
More recent controls have a CPU, which uses integrated I/O modules to control the functions just described, followed by today’s PLCs. Here, the PLC processes and sends signals to Ethernet modules that manage the I/O, all of it controlled under the watchful eye of an HMI that is typically attached to a PC.
“That’s our newest style control,” Reynolds explains. “By adding a PC, we gained almost infinite availability to store and interface with data while giving the user a very accurate graphical representation of what the machine is actually doing during operation. It also provides the capability to differentiate between the different I/O signals, so in the unlikely event that something malfunctions, it automatically tells you where to go in order to fix it.”
Training time
As anyone who has kicked its digital tires can attest, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) allows engineers, managers and maintenance technicians to download and analyze all manner of data. They can then do things like monitor production and scrap rates, predict component failure or when machine maintenance will become necessary, determine power consumption and track other shop floor metrics, all from the comfort of their desk or kitchen table.
All of this brings us back to a fact that Reynolds knows quite well: the industry’s most valuable assets – its employees – bring far more to the production table when properly trained. This statement is especially relevant given the breadth and longevity of CI’s equipment, or where the IIoT and other less well-understood technologies like PM are concerned.
During the installation of a new PM press, CI’s service technicians are onsite and ready to train employees on their new equipment. Reynolds recognizes that shops aren’t always able to break people away from their production floor responsibilities, but he strongly encourages manufacturers to break from that norm to take advantage of the onsite training. Doing so brings great value.
While onsite, service technicians instruct new and experienced operators on the new machine’s inner workings. Company employees get the lay of the land in terms of the machine’s powder feed system, die setup, HMI, programming software, part offloading and maintenance requirements. Common troubleshooting strategies are also covered while CI’s service technicians are onsite.
Questions related to the customer’s specific parts are addressed at length, but Reynolds says that CI is just a phone or zoom call away if customers encounter anything they can’t tackle on their own anytime down the road. Offering remote assistance has long been a priority at CI, but, as with many things, the pandemic heightened those needs and has since changed the way some companies approach company travel.
“Not only is it even more challenging to get people on a plane, but many of the older workers – folks who had the most experience – decided to retire,” Reynolds says. “This made an already difficult labor market even worse.”
It also made it more complicated. Aside from embracing the IIoT, a technology that helps alleviate the worker shortage pain, manufacturers have also responded by investing in automation such as sheet followers or robotic machine tending. Because of this, proper training is more crucial than it’s ever been.
CI’s focus on training is also true for its more well-known equipment, such as its laser and bending systems. For those technologies, CI hosts classes at its headquarters in Ohio and onsite at a customer’s facility. Regardless of the location, CI salespeople aren’t doing the training, but rather factory-trained official trainers who walk the user through the machine they will be working with on the daily. When onsite, trainers are willing to adjust class start and end times to compensate for production schedules and shift availability, minimizing any lost time.
“I’ve taught classes where someone would have to go work on a machine for a couple of hours, then we’d catch them up once they came back to the training room,” Reynolds says. “We’re very flexible.”
