Essex Brass Corporation of Detroit

When Essex Brass Corporation of Detroit ran into a real bind on one of their important component production lines, they turned to The Govro-Nelson Co. for some ex­perienced advice and a practical, economical answer.

The problem was to develop a machine which could pro­duce precision, brass petcock bodies fast enough so that a subsequent assembly and finishing line could function constantly rather than having to shut down frequently for lack of parts.

This work had been handled on a multi-spindle indexing machine which was noisy, slow, and required expensive special multi-purpose tooling with a relatively short work life. Changeover or set-up time on this machine, for dif­ferent parts or tool replacement, would run two, to two and a half hours, all of which added up to disrupted production, loss of production time, and higher than necessary costs.

After careful evaluation of requirements, costs, and pos­sible additional uses for the equipment, a standard Model 195 GOVRO automatic indexing machine was installed. The machine includes eight stations equipped with five GOVRO automatic drilling and two automatic threading units. Production increased three hundred percent with substantially lower cost and consistent superior quality.

The equipment has tremendous flexibility both for present use and for future requirements. Potential room for thir­teen drilling or tapping units is available. Standard "off-the-shelf" cutting tools are used, at a fraction of the cost of the previous special tooling. Vertical drill units are easily adjustable up, down, around a column, which is adjustable in or out. Horizontal units are also adjustable and provi­sion for precision angle drilling is easily accomplished.

The automatic indexing table is a Geneva type, with shot pin locator. It is manually indexable, out of location, for fast, easy tool changes.

Nearly sixty different parts are now produced on this machine with changeover time averaging about thirty minutes. That is FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING!
The machine is unusually quiet in operation and requires only one operator who loads the parts, with OD configura­tion already turned, at station one. Station two, vertical tapdrills one end. Station three, vertical, completes drill­ing. Station four, horizontal, spot drills and faces. Station five horizontal drills the crosshole through the spot faced area. Station six horizontal completes the cross hole. Sta­tions six and seven, vertical, are used for tapping or threading as required. At station eight the part is automatically undamped and unloaded into a tote box.

Total time for each finished part is three and one third seconds (3.33 seconds), well over three times faster than the old method.

The greatly increased production rate of the new machine not only keeps the subsequent assembly operation con­stantly busy but builds a stockpile of parts to keep the line busy while the machine is changed over and running an­other of the sixty different parts it is capable of handling.