CNC West Dec jan 2019

26 www.CNC-West.com CNC WEST December 2018/January 2019 Okuma has been a part of production at Hirsh for decades. The latest investment is a pair of Okuma MU-4000V 5-Axis mills tied into a Fastems 8760 200 pallet management system. This setup is modular so they can add more machining centers as they grow. The Fastems management system knows everything about all the jobs and tooling and it is all automated. the Vast XT scanning technology come in. The QA lab has a pair of Zeiss Contura CMMs that run virtually 24/7. We have three dedicated people manning the lab on days and a single tech on night shift.” Hirsh Precision Products is working with Todd Johnson of Total Quality Systems Inc. who is the local Zeiss distributor to spec out their next Zeiss. It is important to them that all three machines be interchangeable to measure parts. Hirsh has been a loyal Zeiss customer for more than 20 years. They rely on the accuracy, dependability, and support that come with every Zeiss CMM. Hirsh programs the machines using an offline seat of Zeiss Calypso software and store the programs on the network. Then, using whatever machine is available, they download the program and inspect the parts. The machines share the same probe setup, which are easily changed between the different machines. This makes for a very efficient work flow through the inspec- tion department. “The CMM and CNC machines are programmed using the same 3D solid model,” elaborates Wayne. “The CMM programmers base their inspection plan on the customer’s print. Today, we only have one of- fline programming seat of Calypso, but are planning to add a second in the near future.” The plan for the next Zeiss Contura will be to order the same size as Hirsh’s most current model. It will come with an extensive array of styli. The probing system al- lows them to use styli setups with probing lengths from over 10” deep down to using a small styli with a .3mm diameter tip. Hirsh’s CMMs are used for first article in- spection, final inspection, as well as inspection of their in-process operations. Hirsh’s QA team inspect a lot of “Profile” callouts for their customers, and the Zeiss Vast XT scanning probe heads work extremely well for gather- ing a lot of data quickly for checking those features. The vast majority of parts produced will have their quality verified on the Zeiss. A lot of companies talk about culture within their or- ganization. Hirsh is no different, but yet they seem like they are. Safety, quality, productivity is the company mot- to, and they are delivering. Roaming the shop taking pho- tos yields opportunity to see employees in their natural habitat. Besides the extensive shop management systems in every department, there were reminders of “days with- out a safety incident” posters everywhere. That number was at a year. A year without incident in a manufacturing