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| Greg Hoeve displays the decorative wheels that comprise part of the Ego Tripp™ product line at Texas Precision's Lubbock, TX Showroom. |
Flexible manufacturing with economical vertical machining centers puts traditional machine shop in a new business.
Manufacturing parts for the oil fields has its ups and downs. The last dip in the business cycle was a wicked one. About half the competitors of Texas Precision Manufacturing (Lubbock, TX) never made it up the other side and into the 21st century.
Texas Precision rode through on its newly established and streamlined Harley-Davidson® motorcycle parts business. What permitted Texas Precision’s fast ramp-up for this new business venue was a little bit of luck and the wisdom of basing it on a fast-turn, no inventory manufacturing station using flexible, reasonably priced, PC-controlled vertical machining centers.
Need to Diversify
Texas Precision is a family owned contract manufacturer founded in 1975 by Henry and Erika Hoeve. Today, management of the company is shared by the three Hoeve brothers, Greg, Bruce and Clifford, although their parents are still involved in the business. For years the elder Hoeves had tried to diversify their business base, but with limited success.
"You tend to go after what you know best," said Greg Hoeve. "Before starting this business, Dad worked in engineering with NASA and McDonnell Douglas, and Mom was a CPA and controller. That was the kind of business they could relate to. The additional work we tried to get into the shop included parts for military equipment, aircraft, fire production control systems and the like. But these sources of business were never consistent."
The brothers, on the other hand, grew up in the discrete parts manufacturing business, understood all the manufacturing processes and enjoyed hot-rodding. One day they were "fooling around" with a vertical mill and decided to make some business cardholders out of a block of aluminum. Just for fun, they left their cardholders at some local hot rod shops. The next day, someone walked in the door with a job—not a hot rodder, but a Harley owner who wanted custom decorative parts for his bike. That piece of luck happened in 1996.
This fluke job opened the brothers’ eyes to the potential for manufacturing third-party and customized decorative bike parts for the Harley biker community. The Hoeves acquired Virtual Gibbs CAD/CAM software, and spent two years flirting on the edge of the market while they became proficient in writing part programs for their old vertical mill and designing their own decorative Harley parts in AutoCAD. Then they decided to leverage their manufacturing expertise and a stable base of 22 employees to take their business to the next level.
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| Texas Precision has increased productivity 30 percent using Cincinnati VMCs and TCs in the production of Ego Tripp™ components. |
By 1998, the company had defined its initial bike part product line as decorative wheels, sprockets and pulleys that are sold as private label parts or under the Ego Tripp™ brand name. With the exception of special paint jobs, wheels are the most visible decorative accessory you can put on a bike. Sprockets and pulleys are complementary parts.
Texas Precision manufactures and ships them on an as ordered basis. To assure its customers with consistent on time deliveries, the company invested in a dedicated flexible manufacturing arrangement consisting of two Cincinnati Machine Arrow VMC-750 3-axis Vertical Machining Centers and a Cincinnati Machine Sabre VMC-500 3-axis Vertical Machining Center. It also acquired a Cincinnati Machine Falcon TC-200 2-axis Turning Center for batch processing of wheel blanks.
All the machines are equipped with Cincinnati Machine’s PC-based, dual processor A2100 controllers. With Windows NT control and touch-screen interface, the A2100 control provides a user-friendly operating and programming environment. For example, the Tool Management subroutine lets operators view the tooling sequence as it appears in the tool changer. Virtual Gibbs Shop Floor Programming displays a 3D model of the cut part during programming, making interference and errors easily identifiable.
Texas Precision quotes three weeks’ delivery on all of its orders in an industry in which custom parts frequently take months to deliver. Fast turn arounds on delivery along with excellent designs and part quality, has given the Ego Tripp brand word-of-mouth fame among dealers and the bikers themselves. Not only has flexible manufacturing enabled Texas Precision to be ultra-responsive to customers, it has also enhanced the manufacturer’s profitability on a number of fronts:
• Ease of Training
Skilled machinists are not readily available in today’s market. Hoeve said, "We literally have to train everybody who walks in the door. We have used all kinds of controls, but nothing has been as easy to train employees with as the Acramatic 2100 control."
• Service from Cyberspace
Cincinnati Machine’s PC-based controllers have also added value in the area of service. While Hoeve gives Cincinnati Machine high marks for service, he does not relish the cost of bringing a service person for a routine call from Dallas—a six-hour drive. Instead, each machine controller is equipped with a modem so that Hillary Machinery, Cincinnati’s distributor, can troubleshoot the equipment remotely. Soon, Web Cams will be installed in each machine so that the remote Cincinnati technician will be able to visually observe how the machine has been set up.
• 30 Percent More Productivity
More spindles with the same amount of labor made Ego Tripp products increasingly profitable over the last two years. Before installing the flexible manufacturing station, two people worked full-time manufacturing motorcycle parts. Now the same two people working in a station can complete at least 30 percent more customer orders.
• Flexible Order Fulfillment
Instead of queuing like parts for economy of scale, complete sets of parts are made in the manufacturing station on a first come, first-served basis. This is the secret of a fast turnaround. Generic wheels, pulleys and sprockets are premanufactured to meet the specs of 11 Harley models and then held in inventory. Unique features of the parts, primarily decorative, are added in the final manufacturing step.
• Fast Machine Setups
Part programs are generated off-line using Virtual Gibbs software. Greg Hoeve said that being able to generate programs quickly for this business is very important because a large percentage of orders are one of a kind. Machine operators have been trained in this intuitive program and they make adjustments to optimize the program at the machine. These are saved to disk for potential future use.
All the tools needed to manufacture the wheel, pulley or sprocket are stored in a specific machine, so setup can be accomplished in a matter of minutes. While one operator manufactures generic parts, the other moves from machine to machine, setting them up to turn out complete sets. A typical order consisting of two wheels, a pulley and two brake rotors, run two at a time, can be completed in about an hour and a half.
• Reduced Polishing Time
An unforeseen benefit of the vertical machining center controls’ intuitive flexibility, along with the machine’s inherent rigidity, has been a substantial decrease in the time required for manually polishing the heat-treated, T6 forged aluminum finished parts. "This easy-to-use control allows a moderately skilled operator to turn out an excellent finish on the product," Hoeve said. "Our operators have learned to eliminate chatter and other cosmetic problems by decreasing rpm or increasing feed rate or some balance of the two. For us it is a monumental issue because success of our products is very much dependent on cosmetics. We have to hand polish the intricate geometries we produce, and we have customers who swear that our polished aluminum pieces are chrome plated."
• Better Cash Flow
"We have one machining center that does nothing but run motorcycle wheels. Another does nothing but run pulleys. A third runs nothing but brake rotors. A year ago we had a lot of dead time on these machines. We could afford it because the machines were so reasonably priced," Hoeve said. "Today we don’t have dead time because our customers know we run all the parts concurrently. So we can reduce lead times that are typical in our industry by 75 percent or more."
• Balancing Production
The Ego Tripp business strategy is to always have enough spindle time available to keep customers satisfied in three weeks or less. While Greg Hoeve is not disturbed to have one of his machines idle because they are relatively inexpensive compared to labor costs, he frequently picks up slack time by manufacturing couplings for the oil field side of the business. The company has generated a number of complex internal spline geometries for the oil field driveline products. Hoeve said, "We developed some techniques for actually milling the splines inside the coupling, in blind holes. The Cincinnati Machine Vertical Machining Centers have proven to be excellent for that. They have an unusual amount of Z-axis travel, which allows us to enter a very long piece that has to be fixtured vertically."
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| The easy-to-use A2100 allows for flexibility and reduced operator training time.. |
With more than two years of participation in the Harley aftermarket under its belt, the Ego Tripp line is beginning to get some serious industry recognition. Articles are appearing in publications such as Easy Rider, Eagles Eye, and Hot Rod Bikes magazine. If momentum continues to build, the brand may be expanded with additional products—nondecorative functional parts that are very profitable.
At a recent dealer convention with more than 1300 exhibitors, a new Ego Tripp wheel pattern was voted one of the 30 hottest products. Hoeve believes that Ego Tripp products are up on bikers’ radar screens now because of quality and consistent short deliveries. The flexible manufacturing strategy had a lot to do with both. Any passenger who has buckled into a seat aboard a 767,777, DC9, DC10, MD80 or any of a number of regional jets has been literally surrounded by components manufactured by C&D Aerospace.