Equipping for Volume
The Johnson Matthey Southern California Plant Uses 3 Nakamura WT100 Multi-tasking Systems to Produce 30,000 Delrin Parts a Month.Story and photos by C. H. Bush, editor
Machine supervisor, Mark Aguilar, studies a production traveler in preparation for setting up one of three Nakamura WT100 multi-tasking machining systems. The WT100 is a 7-axis machine, equipped with an LNS bar feeder and a built-in robot part handler.
Want an education in medical products terminol-ogy? Words like stents, hypotube or ablation catheters, angioplasty, implantable defibrillators, minimally invasive? Then take a visit to Johnson Matthey’s Southern California medical products manufacturing plant and talk to Jyrki Larjanko (medical products manager for the Noble Metals Business Unit) or Steve Hill, plant opera-tions manager. If you do, it won’t be long before you’ll think you accidently dropped in on a medical school, instead of a highly successful machining job shop
“We use those words because that’s the way our cus-tomers talk,” says Larjanko. “We have to understand their problems in order to solve them. We serve the medical in-dustry, producing products and components for such devices as pacemakers, implantable defibulators, electrophysiology devices, catheters, plus we build a lot of tooling used in their own manufacturing equipment.
“In some ways we’re like an ordinary job shop,” says Hill. “In other ways, once we get a production contract, we’re more of a contract manufacturer. In some cases our product volumes are as low as 10 pieces a month. We also have a project where we produce 30,000 units a month.
“We generally work on long-term contracts for the high-volume projects,” Larjanko explains. “But we do a lot of small design-stage projects for startup companies, too. Doc-tors and others in the medical field are constantly inventing new ways to help us live longer, and for those people, we’re a great resource. We have some excellent engineers here to help them find ways to improve their designs for manufactur-ability without losing functionality. ”
“We go a lot further than that, though,” Hill says. “We’ve had customers who had some chronic problems on their manufacturing lines and couldn’t solve them. In those cases, we’ve gone to their plants and looked around at what they were doing and said, ‘Well, you’re having to assemble these parts. What if we made these two pieces as one part.’ They get excited and say, ‘Wow, can you do that?’ Then we do it and that solves their problem.”
The Noble Metals Business Unit is a subdivision of the Johnson Matthey Precious Metals Division. Total annual rev-enues for 150-plus-year-old Johnson Matthey, a UK-based company, topped $12 billion on its last annual report.
“The fact that we’re a large, well-funded company makes us perfect for startup companies in the medical field,” adds Hill. “Some people think startups ought go to small shops, but the truth is, once their new product is developed and be-gins to sell, they will need a company like ours to handle the volume. Most of our customers agree it makes sense to start and stay with a company that can take them through a prod-uct’s entire life cycle. As a result, we do a lot of trial and error prototyping for customers during the development stage, and the truth is, we’re quite competitive.”
Quality Systems Make the Difference
Steve Hill says that for the most part his Southern Califor-nia operation doesn’t compete with smaller job shops.
“Probably it’s because they can’t compete with us,” he says. “We have an extensive quality system that is needed by the medical device industry. Our system is very robust, because it has to be.
“When we talk about quality, it’s not just product quality,” Larjanko adds. “It’s also an indepth documentation process. For the medical devices industry, you have to prove to the customer you can manufacture a product exactly the same way every time. Every process has to be documented.”
“We’re ISO 9001: 2000 certified,” says Hill. “That’s a very strict standard that says an organization needs to dem-onstrate its ability to consistently provide product that meets customer and applicable regulatory requirements. Our cus-tomers have to be able to document every product they make down to the smallest component, and we can do that. Quite often we go through some very intensive two and three-day audits on the quality systems, which smaller shops don’t have the resources to handle.”
Larjanko: “At the moment we’re in the process of getting ISO 14001 certified, too. Having the quality systems needed by the medical devices industry is really important, and is definitely one of the things that set us apart.
Temecula plant operations manager,
Production Capabilities
In order to handle the range of production requirements for such a wide volume range, the Southern California facil-ity has more than 150 employees working in a 42,000-sq-ft facility.
“We have a lot of high-quality equipment,” Hills says. “We have six Sodick wire EDMs, we have a variety of 3-axis mills and turning machines. Our latest acquisitions are three 7-axis, Nakamura WT100 multi-tasking machining centers. We bought those to handle the 300,000-unit-a-month proj-ect I mentioned. Right now we’re running those twenty-four hours a day, five days a week.”
“If we think a customer’s project can be big for him,” Lar-janko adds, “we don’t hesitate to go out and find the technol-ogy we need to handle production for him. That’s what we did with the Nakamura machines.
“We had an opportunity to do a family of high-volume black Delrin plastic components about 4” long with diame-ters of roughly 5/8ths to 3/4”,” Hill explains. “The parts were too complex to be injection molded. They had a lot of differ-ent operations, requiring three or four setups, which in the volumes they wanted, would have been almost impossible to do without automation.”“And we had to be really price competitive,” Larjanko says. “We had to be able to run the machines unattended, but keep the quality at very high levels.
View of the built-in parts handling-robot in the WT100
Enter the Nakamura WT100
To meet their production needs, Johnson Matthey went searching for the right kind of machine to handle the parts.
“The parts have multiple ODs and multiple IDs,” Hill says. “There are probably eight or nine cross-axis features. There are two cross holes that break into the ID, and then there are a number of holes that are parallel with the axis of the part; they’re not on center, they’re off-center holes, very small and deep holes. Like I said, not for injection molding.
“We went to Westec, trying to find a solution,” Larjanko says, “and eventually we found the WT100. There were other bigger machines that could do the job, but our parts aren’t huge. We liked the WT100 because it has a small footprint.
“The beauty of this technology,” Hill says, “is that all the turrets and the spindles work together. So, you can really get a lot of simultaneous machining done. You basically have two machines in one. And, even if you only looked at cycle time, without the savings in setups and handling, you’re cutting cycle time in half.”“You’re also improving quality, too,” says Larjanko.
“You don’t have any accumulated error from setup to setup, because one setup does it.”
ip Problem with PlasticHills says with Delrin the chip-handling problem can be severe.“With plastic you get long stringy chips, kind of like fish-ing line,” he says. “The chips just don’t break. The stuff is always where you don’t want it. It strings together. It won’t break, because it’s tough. So, basically, you have these rat’s nests going on all over the place. That’s a big problem.”So how did they solve it?“The WT100 had an option for high-pressure coolant, so we got that,” Hill says. “That did the trick. The coolant just blows the stringy plastic chips away. Problem solved.”
