Drake in Tooling and Production

Over the last 30 years, Haylo Manufacturing, Cleveland, Ohio, has built a national reputation for the exceptional precision and value of its thread-grinding capabilities for industries as diverse as plastics to aircraft, gear makers to nuclear power companies. Its customer list numbers more than 2000 who utilize more than 600 thread forms working in non-metallics and non-ferrous as well as mild, tool and stainless steels for grinding molds and worms.

In 1992, Haylo obtained a menu-driven Drake 12x45 CNC thread grinder. Along with the machine came the CNC thread-grinding routines that have enabled Haylo to not only meet its continuing variety of thread-grinding jobs, but to become even more competitive when bidding for new jobs.

The reason: Stig Mowatt-Larssen, Drake's systems engineer and his software-writing confreres at Drake, who developed the original CNC thread-grinding routines for the Drake machines. His expertise at writing new routines for unusual thread-grinding requests has enabled Haylo to successfully bid for new jobs, using the CNC machine.

Haylo found the Drake 12x45 CNC grinder to be the most productive and accurate in the shop, even on the most demanding tapers and special thread forms. More important, it found that the on-going software and process support and guidance of the machine's manufacturer enabled it to bid and produce the most complex parts -- parts that would be nearly impossible and definitely impractical to manufacture with ordinary manual set-up.

While the standard capability of the CNC Drake grinder includes complete control of the infeed axis and taper correction, a part for a plastic moldmaker, for example, involved several complex changes of the taper. Working with Drake software engineers, Jack Haymond, vice president and one of the three founders of Haylo, arranged to have a new menu page added to the program, allowing the operator to simply input the taper change locations. The machine now makes the adjustments automatically, greatly improving the production rate and enhancing Haylo's competitiveness.

Shown here is a three-start bronze worm for a diesel engine component. Production rate tripled when produced on the CNC machine due to the automatic indexing capability compared with producing it on a manual machine and manually indexing the worm.

Other Drake software-inspired job innovations include grinding carbon electrodes for EDM and eliminating wheel washout of a high helix worm gear. Another benefit of the ability to quickly and easily adapt the Drake grinder to optimize performance on each job is that the shop no longer needs machines that have been set up specifically for a complex job -- only to sit idle between runs. With the software flexibility of the CNC Drake, even the most complicated set-up can be done in minutes, using the menu-driven prompts.

According to Jim Shrodes, one of Haylo's veteran machinists, a typical menu change on the Drake takes about five minutes. Even with a wheel-form change, it can be set up in about 15 minutes, compared with the 8 to 10 hours often needed for a manual set-up. Simplified set-up and operation also eliminate problems or delays that can occur when a specially trained machinist is sick or on vacation.