When Scott Harris founded Phoenix, AZ’s Harris Precision Mold in 1991, he was determined to do things right the first time around.

“I had really good advice from my uncle, who owned a large mold and die shop in the Phoenix area,” Harris says. “After high school, I worked in Illinois in metalworking for five years, then moved to Arizona to work for my uncle, who ran a large Phoenix-based injection molding company with a tool room. I worked for him for another four years, learning tool making and mold making. After that I worked for another mold maker as general manager for five years, so I had quite a bit of machining experience when I finally decided it was time for my own shop. What I didn’t have was business experience, and that’s where my uncle was a great help. He helped me establish good credit and taught me the importance of always paying our bills on time. He didn’t really help with money, but was able to vouch for me with some of our local suppliers, which was a tremendous help for a start-up company.”

No Looking Back

Harris’s uncle eventually retired and established a small hobby machine shop, but at one point he became ill and needed medical care.

“He sold the hobby shop to my wife and me,” Harris says. “We started out with one employee back then, and now we have two divisions, one in Phoenix and one in Salt Lake City, Utah. We own an 11,000 square-foot building here, and we lease a 8,000 square-foot facility in Salt Lake. At present we have about thirty-five employees total in both divisions.”

After a few years in business, Harris decided he wanted to grow his company, but do so without all the headaches and dangers of getting “too big.”

“In 2000 the moldmaking industry was hit pretty hard,” he says, “so we decided to concentrate on the medical and consumer industries, and especially the medical industry, which seems to be somewhat immune to the severe ups and downs of the economy. Right now the main part of our business is making molds for disposable medical components. We’re also pretty heavy into consumer components.”

Seeing the impact of the 2000 recession on large moldmaking and other shops, Harris made up his mind to find a different way to grow his business.

“I thought we should grow by establishing a satellite shop in Salt Lake City,” he says. “The logic was we would grow, but also minimize our risk. I wanted to establish a small-shop success formula that we could duplicate in different locations whenever we felt it was feasible.”

Interchangeable Molds

An important part of Harris’s formula for success was to concentrate on building precision molds with easily interchangeable components.

“We build molds that are expected to run over many years,” he says. “As a result, having interchangeable components is critical. The molds we build have very tight tolerances for the products they produce, but our tolerances are even tighter because of the need for component interchangeability. To make a mold with interchangeable components, we have to be precise in the or plus or minus two ten thousandths of an inch range.”

Why such emphasis on interchangeability?

“Our molds are used all over the U.S. and around the world,” he explains. “If a component breaks down, our customers want to be able to plug in a spare part without having to re-machine the component before they can use it. The only way that is possible is through very high precision machining. People who buy automobiles expect to be able to buy spare parts and have those spares work. It’s the same way with our customers. If a mold component breaks, our customers want to be able to plug in a spare and go. For them downtime is unacceptable.”

Harris says that building molds with interchangeable parts is not yet the norm in the industry.

“But it is becoming more standard,” he says. “I would say two things are pushing us in that direction. First, it’s the need to compete in the global economy and second, machine tools keep getting better and better and make achieving that kind of precision quicker and easier to do.”

To help achieve very high precision, Harris Precision works with 3D models of the products for which they build molds.

“All of our jobs are 3D modeled using solid model software,” Harris says. “We put all the attributes, all the vents, all the features on that model. From there all our shop guys use it as a ‘Virtual Gage.’ That model is used on our EDMs, on our mills and on our CMMs when we check quality. When you build and test everything to a perfect virtual gage, you have a pretty good chance of getting it right.”

Advanced Technology Equipment

Another important key in Harris’s formula for success is to keep both his shops highly productive.

“For years we had been using our Matsuura mills to produce electrodes that in turn are used on our EDMs to burn our mold components,” he says. “But a couple of years ago we began reading and hearing about high-speed hard milling. It sounded pretty good, so we looked into it.”

Harris eventually discovered Sodick’s high-speed milling machines.

“About eighteen months ago we bought two of the mills from Kevin Savage at Savage Machine Tools,” he says. “One was a Sodick MC 650L, which has a 40,000-rpm spindle and the other was a Sodick MC 430L, which has a 30,000-rpm spindle. We looked at a number of machines, but the Sodicks seemed to give us quite a bit more for our money. For example, the Sodick machines bundled all of the hard milling accessories—tool holders, mist lube and recovery system, graphite vacuum, shrink-fit heat device, and laser tool detector—that we needed in the total machine price. There were no extras to bother with.”

Why the Switch to Hard Milling?

Harris says the benefits of his switchover to high-speed milling have been amazing.
“One of the biggest benefits has been the elimination on many mold components of the need to do any EDM machining,” he says. “In the old days, high-speed machining was used only for bigger parts, but with these Sodick machines we can mill very small parts using cutters as small as .1 millimeters, which is about four thousandths of an inch. On top of that we get very fine finishes which minimize the cost and time for polishing.”

Another major savings with the Sodicks was the significant reduction in the number of electrodes produced.

“We’ve reduced the number of electrodes we produce by as much as 40%,” Harris says. “That saves on the up-front costs for graphite and copper. Cycle times for machining on the mills and the EDMs are about the same for a given component, but, like I said, there’s no longer any need to produce electrodes. We still use the EDMs to machine parts that can’t be done on the mills, but that’s easy compared to what we used to do.”
Initial cost wasn’t the only factor involved in Harris’s decision to go with the Sodick mills.

Why Sodick High-Speed Mills?

“Three things really sold us on Sodick,” Harris says. “First they were very accurate, but to get that accuracy they had to be extremely rigid, which they are. Also, they use heavy-duty linear motors on all three axes, which gives them true thermal stability and pinpoint accuracy. These machines don’t use thermal sensors; they don’t have to. The linear motors and the machine’s rigidity keep them stable. Of course we do control the temperature in our shops, but that’s mainly for the benefit of our employees. If you know Phoenix, you’ll understand that.”

Harris has the MC 650L hooked up to a System 3R Workmaster Robot.

“But that’s not just for high production runs,” he says. “The ability to remain flexible is important to us. We need to be able to flip a switch and run our machines just like any other off-the-shelf machine, or to flip a switch and go back to high-production mode without changing our culture or changing our work flow. The Sodick allowed us to position the 3R in such a way that we can do that.”

Where to from Here?

Harris is very pleased with the progress of his business so far, but he doesn’t intend to stand still.

“I want to keep growing the business,” he says, “but my main goal is to build a perpetual company, one that can keep going after I retire. That’s really what I want.”

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