Copyright Society of Manufacturing Engineers Jun 2000
Lasers give an automotive job shop the right niche
Our 24-employee job shop developed a $3.4-- million business with automotive OEMs and their Tier One and two suppliers in just over five years. The winning strategy: focus on cutting production and prototype parts by laser. That's all we do. It's kept us busy. Throughout the first quarter of last year, the shop worked around the clock every clay except New Year's. Typically, during our busy season, five laser units run two shifts, seven days a week.
Lot size varies tremendously. Prototyping accounts for about 65% of our work, and those orders usually range from 200 to 300 parts. The rest of the jobs are short-run production, where lots could go up to 10,000 pieces. The tough part of laser work is that it's usually the last major process before the parts are shipped to an assembly line. By its very nature, the final trim work on the stampings is usually a rush job.
To keep work moving and accommodate these diverse schedules, we use five laser cutting units from Mazak Nissho Iwai (Schaumburg, IL). Two Super Turbo X-18 three-axis machines with 2 and 2.5-kW lasers cut flat sheets up to 0.75" (19 mm) thick. A third three-axis unit, the Laser Champ, has a 1-kW laser and is built for speed. One of two six-axis units for processing complex threedimensional shapes is an FMS, the other is a standalone laser identical to the one in the FMS, but without multiple stations and a pallet-changing system.