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Hawks Turn South To Tebo
Cincinnati Hawk Turning Centers Help Improve Productivity of Major International Automotive Parts Supplier
Improving the efficiency of production operations sometimes only requires changing philosophy. At Grupo Tebo in Naucalpán de Juárez, Edo, de México, production efficiency improvements came simply from trying a new approach to turning operations.
Tebo is a major manufacturer of brake hose fittings, steering system and suspension components for the world automotive industry. The company, in business for nearly 30 years, supplies components to the Mexican manufacturing operations of Volkswagen, Nissan, Chrysler and General Motors, and exports products to European manufacturers Peugeot and Renault.
Diversification has made Grupo Tebo the major parts supplier that it is today. The company produces its own rubber compounds to be manufactured into brake hose and operates a small company that manufactures weather stripping for car doors. In another operation, Grupo Tebo manufactures disc brake calipers, master cylinders, boosters and wheel cylinders. The company also produces cold and hot forged parts that are used in its own manufacturing operations.
Handling Short Runs
Turning is the primary manufacturing operation in the brake hose fitting operation. The company makes more than one million brake hose assemblies per month, each with at least two fittings. Plus, to meet OEM requirements, the company produces some 2000 different types of brake hose fittings. These small parts are machined from 12-L-14 free cutting steel, 1006 or 1010 steel, generally in the form of 3/4" bar stock.
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| Hawk TC-150 Turning Center at Tebo work in harmony with multi-spindle machines to provide the company with a wide range of production flexibility. |
"A certain, smaller amount of our total brake hose fitting production is dedicated to the automotive aftermarket," said Heinz Otto, Grupo Tebo Manufacturing Director. "The Cincinnati turning centers are perfect for these smaller runs, special runs, and prototype work. We can use standard tooling, which saves money, and the part changeover time is much faster with the turning centers than with the multi-spindle machines."
The Hawk TC-150 Turning Center combines high performance with low cost and low maintenance requirements to make it an effective replacement for multi-spindle machines. The Hawk TC-150 comes standard with a 6" chuck.
The turning centers in Tebo's brake hose fitting operation are equipped with bar feed magazines to accommodate different sizes and shapes of bar stock necessary for the variety of parts produced.
"The combination of the turning centers and the bar feeders has helped us improve the short run operation significantly," Otto said.
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| Cincinnati Hawk turning center machines at Tebo have helped the company reduce machine idle time caused by job setups. Small, specialty and custom runs for parts like these can be quickly set up on the Hawk TC-150s. |
In its ball joint manufacturing operation, Tebo replaced multi-spindle machines with four Hawk TC-150 Turning Centers equipped with expanding mandrils. The result was a 30 percent increase in productivity.
"After we made the switch from the multi-spindle machines to the Hawks, we saw that we produced more parts in a day from the Hawk than we produced on a multi-spindle machine," Otto said.
One area where productivity improved was a reduction in machine idle time caused by job setups. The Tebo manufacturing operation generally has long production runs, but, there are occasionally requirements for smaller batches of 3000 to 4000 pieces.
"You can imagine setting up multi-spindle machines for such production operations," Otto said. "In some cases, it would take us three to four hours to change over a machine setup. With the Hawk machines, job changeover takes about 15 minutes."
Another area of improvement was throughput. The Hawks' high-speed servo-driven turret reduces station-to-station indexing time to 0.2 seconds.
The switch to the turning centers also helped solve a chip problem that the production operation was experiencing with the multi-spindle machines.
"When machining certain steels, the multi-spindle machines produced long chips," Otto said. "That was a real problem because the chips not only affected the surface finish of the part, but also required us to periodically stop the machine and remove them. Tooling with chip breakers was expensive," he said, "so that wasn't a solution."
Fixturing didn't present a problem. Initially, Tebo purchased chucks fitted with jaws. Now, the company makes it own fixtures which has helped reduce costs. The company is also using standard carbide tools, rather than special inserts, for additional cost savings. The result has been an approximate 40 percent reduction in fixturing and tooling costs.
Have the new turning centers been integrated smoothly into the production operation? "Yes. We've actually found that we've had more applications for the turning centers than we initially planned for," Otto said. "For example, we're producing some steering linkage parts on the Hawks now and may do some other parts as well."
The operators have had no problems learning how to use the turning centers. The Siemens A2100 CNC control is a powerful, multi-tasking system with dual-processor PC technology, Windows NT control and a touch screen interface.
"Because of the easy-to-use interface, the operators have been able to quickly get the Hawks running at optimum capacity, and that has been a tremendous boost to getting the machines integrated into our operations," Otto said.
Although it's generally not fair to compare the productivity of multi-spindle and screw machines with turning centers, these machines do have a place in large production operations, according to Otto. "With just a little experimentation, we found the perfect balance between the two types of machining operations and our operations are more efficient because of it."