Precision Machining Archives

CNC Industries has been awarded a new multi-year contract

CNC Industries is pleased to announce that we have been awarded a new multi-year contract for production of custom manufactured aerospace components. For this contract we will supply aluminum brackets, chassis, housings, and assembly components for the Boeing 737 MAX commercial jet. This contract is the beginning of what we hope to be many more contracts to produce parts for jets representing the future of the aviation industry. The 737 Max jet uses the new Leap-1B engine which allows it to be less expensive to operate and more environmentally friendly.

The new contract represents a major growth point for CNC Industries. We have been producing parts for the CFM56 and other contemporary jet engines for the prior 10 years, and continue to do so. As these engines are being replaced with newer, more efficient engines, CNC Industries will continue to play our part in the supply chain. We are proud to play our part in the machining and assembly of more than 200 individual aerospace components going into planes and jets throughout the entire world.

CNC Industries has been a long time partner to many aviation and aerospace manufacturers and has made components for both military and commercial jets. As a component part manufacturer to the aerospace and defense markets, CNC understands the importance of high quality and on-time delivery performance. We have been certified to the AS9100 quality standard every year since 2010 when we first applied for the certification and take pride in frequently being the number one supplier to our customers. Our parts have been used in most major commercial jet platforms all over the world.

November 15th, 2017|

Recent parts made by CNC Industries

Shown below is a complex, application-critical Aerospace part that has been recently produced by CNC Industries for the Department of Defense (DOD).

This is an image of the CAD-generated Solid Model that was created by CNC Industries in order to manufacture the part.

This part is approximately 36” long and was machined out of solid billet aluminum.

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These are various views of the finished part as supplied to the DLA (Defense Logistics Agency).

As you can imagine a part like this takes a tremendous amount of planning, fixturing, modeling, machining, finishing, and inspection to meet all of the stringent requirements.

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Below is another example of a complex part which we manufactured for the D.O.D.

This part is approximately 24” long and was machined from solid billet aluminum.

A 3-D solid model of the part was created in-house on our CAD system from the original 2-D drawings. We then designed and manufactured numerous fixtures for machining and measuring the parts.

This is another example of a mission-critical part which was precision CNC machined and assembled to very stringent specifications for the DLA (Defense Logistics Agency). As can be seen in the images, the part was painted per NADCAP certified standards.

April 27th, 2012|

Steve Deam, Jr. is speaking at the JobshopLean 2011 Conference at Ohio State University

Because of the extensive work that CNC Industries has done in the area of using technology to support lean manufacturing, Steve Deam Jr. has been invited to speak at the JobshopLean 2011 Conference hosted by Ohio State.

The purpose of this conference is to explore the many ways that implementing Lean Manufacturing in a Jobshop is different than implementing it in Toyota. The primary difference, as quoted from the “Jobshoplean” web site, is: “A typical Jobshop is a HIGH-mix and VARIABLE-volume manufacturer of a large variety of components. Whereas, Toyota is a LOW-mix HIGH-volume manufacturer of a few assembled products. Consequently, while it is easy to recognize “Value Streams” at Toyota and many of their Tier 1 suppliers, this is a challenge in the case of a Jobshop where 100’s, if not 1000’s, of different routings need to be grouped into process families.”

Steve will be speaking on September 7, 2011 from 8:00am to 9:00am. He will discuss numerous ways that using technology can cut overhead expenses as well as facilitate Lean production in the shop.

Topics will include:

• Utilizing standard software and computers to a greater extent than the typical machine shop

• Document Management

• Corrective Actions Management

• Data Collection, Data Processing into Information for Decision Support and Information Transfer across the Shop

• Data Visualization

Click

[here] to see Steve’s presentation outline in PDF format. (Depending on your connection speed it may take a few minutes to load.)

Click [here] to see the bio’s of the various speakers.

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Steve Deam Jr. is V.P. of Finance as well as V.P. of I.S. at CNC Industries.

CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based Job-Shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 50 people and is adding people on a continuous basis.

September 1st, 2011|Tags: CNC Industries, CNC machining, Lean Manufacturing|

Upcoming Parts Profiles

CNC Industries is often asked for details on the parts that we machine. Being a precision machine shop, we make a wide variety of parts for many different industries. We have many multiple purpose machines for a wide variety of production options. Due to the wide variety of parts that we machine, it is sometimes difficult for prospective customers to know if we have the expertise to machine their parts.

In order to help clarify our capabilities we are going to begin adding detailed profiles of many of the parts that we machine for our customers. We will have details on machining, material used, engineering concerns, and any sort of unique or challenging aspects of the production. We hope to be able to display our many machining capabilities in a way that will be useful and informative to any prospective or customers. The goal will be to have a searchable and sortable index of our precision machined parts for reference.

January 28th, 2011|Tags: Aerospace, CNC, Machining, Precision|

CNC Industries 2010 Customer Satisfaction Results

At CNC Industries we take pride in our ability to provide all of our customers with the highest quality precision machined parts, on time delivery, competitive pricing, and overall customer satisfaction. At the end of each year we conduct a survey of all customers that we conducted business with in the prior year. In 2010 CNC Industries had our 3rd best sales year of all time. Even in the down economy that is affecting so many companies, we increased our sales by 10% over 2009.

For 2010 we asked for feedback on the following areas:

1) Timeliness of receiving quotes from CNC Industries

2) Ease of placing a new order with CNC Industries

3) On time deliveries

4) Overall quality

5) Price competitiveness

6) Responsiveness to any special considerations or needs

7) Engineering support

8 ) Responsiveness to Corrective Actions

9) Friendliness and professionalism of CNC Industries employees

10) Shipping methods and shipping terms

11) Responsiveness to changing needs

12) Please rate your overall impression of CNC Industries

13) Would you be to recommend to CNC Industries to a colleague?

14) Do you plan to order from CNC Industries again?

The results of the survey are as follows:

Our average rating for all categories for 2010 was a 4.5 out of 5. Overall we have improved our ratings in virtually every category from the 2009 ratings.

Some quotes from our survey:

“Quotes are always with-in or ahead of the requested due dates.”

“Impressed by CNC’s commitment to address process and product controls. This goes a long way towards preventing quality issues.”

“CNC’s flexibility has helped us in a lot of tough situations.”

“I just wish I had more product that I could move to CNC.”

Thank you again to all of our many customers and we look forward to working with you again in 2011.

January 7th, 2011|Tags: Customer Feedback|

CNC Industries is AS9100 Certified.

We will be issuing a press release about this early next week, but we are now fully certified to AS9100 B. The official certificate and press kit came in the mail today, and we were placed in the OASIS online database of certified suppliers earlier in the week. Overall the auditing to certification process was relatively painless, for a four day audit at least.

We have researched the AS9100 certification statistics a little bit:

In Fort Wayne there are only 8 AS9100 certified companies, including CNC Industries. CNC Industries is the only precision machine shop in Fort Wayne to receive an AS9100 certification. Likewise we are the only custom machine shop certified in Fort Wayne as well.

In Indiana there are now 112 companies certified to AS9100. The vast majority are service or assembly houses. We have not looked at all of the certifications, but our estimation is that we are one of only 10 or so machine shops to be certified to AS9100.

In the United States there are 5725 total companies certified. assuming the same approximate ratio of machine shops, I would assume that we are one of 575 machine shops in the country with the AS9100 certification. This puts us in a very elite class of machine shops, one that we are proud to be a member of.

The full press release will be issued early next week.

August 6th, 2010|

AS 9100 Audit is complete

July 16th was the final day of our Stage 2 AS9100 audit! It has been a lengthy, stressful time to move from ISO 9001 to AS 9100. We have done extremely well in our audit process, and only have a pair of very minor findings to be 100%. Both corrective actions are completed and we are waiting on getting a little bit of paperwork done, and then final review from the audit board at SGS and we will be officially certified as an AS9100 company.

At CNC Industries we look at this as another way to add confidence to our customers – who are extremely quality conscious. As I have talked about on this blog aerospace machining is a difficult industry to be in. The price, quality, and delivery requirements put on aerospace suppliers are all extreme and the management of the business must be able to handle the many pressures and unforeseen issues that will arise.

Here at CNC Industries, we feel that we have all of the tools necessary to provide the best of the ‘three-legged stool’ to our customers – best price, on-time delivery, and quality. We look forward to issuing a formal press release as soon as the paperwork is complete on the audit.

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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.

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June 23rd, 2010|Tags: AS 9100|

Precision Aerospace Machining and the seven wastes of lean manufacturing (part 5)

The fifth of the seven wastes is the most readily obvious waste – defects. A part or product that is not made correctly and needs to be either re-worked or discarded, is obviously a waste. The time spent on the original part is wasted, the material and other costs are wasted, the time that it takes to re-work or re-make the part is wasted. Overall defects cause considerable disruptions and waste.

Once again high volume work has an easier time of removing defects from the process. the length of the run of a part will justify creating more complex and expensive fixturing to enable quality at the course – so that the part has little or no chance of being produced improperly. Custom inspection procedures will allow quick discovery of any non-conforming parts as well.

In a low volume high mix facility – as a large portion of CNC Industries is, making custom machined parts and precision aerospace machined parts, we cannot spend an extensive amount of time on fixturing – our lead time for the entire first batch of product is sometimes shorter than production companies will spend on a single fixture for a production part. The inspection requirements and quality standards will also vary – sometimes greatly – between parts running through our shop at the same time. We have to ensure that each fixture is made quickly and still performs as it needs to.

Of course defects are caused by a myriad of issues beyond just the fixturing the part correctly. We have many more methods of preventing mistakes and defects before they occur, but I think a more telling evaluation of a companies dedication to eliminating defects is the processes taken when a defect does occur. At CNC Industries, we place great emphasis on root cause analysis and corrective / preventative actions. As we are nearing our AS9100 certification, we are more aware of this need than ever before.

Our Corrective Action System is based on the Apollo Root Cause Analysis and allows and indefinite depth of root cause analysis. We regard and defect as a serious issue and are quick to come to an understanding of the root cause that allowed the defect to occur. With our ERP system, we are able to quickly resolve any ongoing systemic issue and immediately take the necessary corrective action to prevent future occurrences of the issue. Preventative and corrective actions and their resolutions are transmitted throughout the company immediately upon completion and necessary procedural and process changes are automatically updated. All relevant documentation is kept entirely in sync with our digital paperless document system.

The ability to adjust our entire process to address a deficiency in the processes that we utilize allows us to have an extremely low defect rate – and when the very occasional defect does occur we can quickly adapt and prevent the problem in the future.

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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.

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June 18th, 2010|Tags: Aerospace Machining, Custom Machined Parts, ERP, Job Manager, Lean Manufacturing, wastes|

Precision Aerospace Machining and the seven wastes of lean manufacturing (part 4)

The 4th waste identified in lean manufacturing is Motion. Motion concerns the ergonomics of the workers in a process and any unnecessary steps or movement that they have in the process.

To again look at the difference of a high mix / low volume precision aerospace machining facility and a high volume production we will see a difference in the ability to reduce motion. In a high volume production environment you can count on a particular workstation being focused on a single task – even if that task is performed over a variety of individual parts, the motions and the ergonomics will be similar. In a low volume precision machine shop, the task on one day may be entirely different than the task of the prior day. While they will be related still – depending on the functionality of the machine at the workstation – the individual parts may require a significant difference in motion or handling.

To compensate for this changing process, CNC industries has designed it’s facility to accommodate a high mix of precision parts easily. While the information and documentation may vary from one part to another, we have standardized the method of getting that information into electronic information stations which are uniformly located near the workstations. Each worker in our facility may count on being able to get all necessary work instructions in the same way.

We have also standardized our machine setups with the tooling being handle off of the machine to eliminate unnecessary motion in the setup process. The advantages of removing extra motion include more productivity, less stress on the people involved in the process, as well as lowered chances of errors and mistakes being made. So even with a facility dedicated to fully custom machined parts and prototypes, we can easily remove unnecessary wastes.

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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.

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June 14th, 2010|Tags: Aerospace Machining, Document Management, Lean Manufacturing, Precision Machining, Technology|

Precision Aerospace Machining and the Seven Wastes of Lean Manufacturing (part 7)

The final of the seven wastes that we are looking at is waiting. Any time that a part is waiting is additional time that you are holding the costs of the part without receiving the income of the part. Waiting, as we have identified it internally comes from three main places: 1) having a part or batch finish with one machine and the next machine required for the part is not available and 2) any part that is in a batch but is not currently being machined, 3) inventory.

The first of these items is very self-explanatory. A batch of parts sitting by a machine waiting to be run through that machine is very obviously waiting. What is a bit less obvious is that even while the batch is being machined, the majority of the parts are still waiting. If there is a batch of 500 parts that each take 1 minute to complete an operation then at minimum each part will have 499 minutes of waiting while the rest are getting machined.

In any production facility where resources are shared between multiple batches / parts, it is extremely difficult to schedule all of the jobs so that no part is ever waiting at all. In fact this scenario is used to illustrate a difficult to impossible problem to solve with computers – known as the Job Shop Problem. This problem may be especially difficult in the aerospace machining industry. With long lead times and large numbers of operations requiring many different resources, scheduling jobs to move through the shop at the best possible rate is exceptionally difficult.

At CNC Industries we address the problem of time wasted while a part is waiting in several different ways. One of the main approaches is our design of a universal fixturing system. We have designed a system of attaching fixtures to our milling machines that will allow a fixture to be machine independent in it’s use. We may design a fixture assuming that the part will be run in one of our Haas VF-2 Superspeed machines, but find that our Toyoda Horizontal is a better choice. With our universal fixturing system we can easily move the part to the most appropriate machine at the correct time and with minimal disruption.

Additionally we focus on redundant machines. Our capacity for production needs to be unaffected by any downtime that a given machine may have. We keep all of our machines well-maintained to prevent any problems, but there is on way to completely prevent down-time. With redundant machines we have the security of knowing that we are not going to be in trouble meeting our deadlines if a machine has any unexpected down-times.

Finally we have worked very hard to get our batch sizes as small as is reasonably possible while also reducing the setup time of each batch. This allows us to eliminate a sizable portion of each part waiting while the rest of the parts in the batch are being machined. The smaller batch sizes also help us to reduce our inventory and prevent the third source of waiting that we have identified.

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CNC Industries is a Fort Wayne, Indiana based machine shop specializing in precision CNC machining, fabrication and assembly of application-critical and custom machined parts for the Aerospace, Defense, Medical, Industrial and Transportation markets. The company presently employs approximately 55 people.

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June 9th, 2010|