Gleason gears up with big machine capability.

When The Gleason Works, Rochester, NY, held its own in-house advanced gear technology show and seminar in September 1992, company management felt that it had a compelling story to tell.

The story line was pretty direct about how an old line manufacturer of gear-cutting and grinding machines had realigned its business and committed $40 million over two years to build a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility.

New product lines and updated old product lines were shown to a large contingent of visitors from here and abroad. At IMTS 94, products featured ran the gamut from small bobbing and grinding machines for spur and helical gears, to the large traditional Phoenix machines that had been enhanced and upgraded such as the #116 CNC machine.

The latest in CNC GE Fanuc controls as well as digital motors and drive controls were ballyhooed, as well as the company's willingness to work with any comparable CNC controls the customer might like.

The new generation of Phoenix machines was designed for accuracy, repeatability, and simplicity in machining. The machines make switching from large to small diameters and gears to pinions practical, and can eliminate the need for lapping after grinding.

For parallel-axis gears, the Gleason 125GH CNC gear hobber provides high-speed hobbing in a small footprint with the rigidity to take full advantage of TiN and TiCN-coated tooling. Developed for automotive transmission applications, the TAG 400 spur and helical gear grinders feature GE Fanuc control and AC digital servo drives.

The machine provides automatic continuous or incremental wheel shifting and dressing, as well as continuously variable wheel speed.

Centerpiece of Gleason's headquarters plant is the new $40 million Standard Products manufacturing facility. The new Gleason facility was intended to centralize manufacturing in Rochester for its line of Phoenix CNC gear cutters, grinders, and hobbers.

Within the manufacturing facility, the large parts machining area where the all-important beds, columns, and way surfaces are machined features state-of-the-art metalcutting machines and strict environmental controls. Temperatures are controlled within [+ or -]1.8 F.

Primary supplier of metalcutting machine tools for the large part machining bay was Toyoda Machinery USA Inc, which supplied three Toyoda FH100 horizontal machining centers and two large BN25A bridge mills for milling the larger castings.

The HMCs had to meet rather demanding specifications. Gleason demanded a rotary index table accuracy of [+ or -]1 second of arc, one-third of the Toyoda FH100's large horizontal's already impressive [+ or -]3 seconds. The FH100 HMCs are large with 39.3"x39.3" pallets and 35 hp spindle drive.

At Gleason, the three FH100 HMCs are arranged in a cellular configuration serviced by a rail-guided vehicle and 24-pallet stocker system. One is used for roughing and two for finishing. Machines are equipped with Renishaw probes. At Gleason's request, Toyoda added an auxiliary tool system above the work spindle to accept extra length (28") tools. The purpose was to reduce the amount of backboring required, that it would be highly precise as a result of the indexing accuracy. Toyoda also extended the X-axis travel from 1600 mm (63") to 2000 mm (78.74").

The two BN25A bridge mills feature 98"x157" shuttling tables, 50-hp spindle drives, hydrostatic slideways, 120-tool ATC systems as well as automatic machine head changers.

Design for manufacturing (DFM) techniques are credited with enabling Gleason to streamline its metalcutting operations and dramatically reduce the number of tools stored on the HMCs to 120. In one example, reducing the number of bearing sizes used in its gear making machines reduced the number of cutting tools required for machining castings by 450 tools. Overall, it formerly took more than 1600 preset tools to machine the castings for just one machine.

Gleason's goals of the Standard Products factory included:

* Capacity to ship one machine per day;

* Significant reduction in machine leadtime;

* Lower inventory requirements;

* Higher precision end products; and

* Lower end-product unit manufacturing cost.

Aiding in realizing its manufacturing goals has been a realtime information network that provides three levels of data: 1) The AS 400 business computer levels, which contains sales orders, engineering drawings, and bills of material; 2) The Factory Manager, driving the workcells, which is the Standard Products' link to the business computer (via Ethernet); 3) The individual workcell level, which includes workstations for receiving, machining, and assembling.

Results to date have been impressive as leadtimes for Gleason's gear cutting and grinding machines have plummeted to a fraction of the time formerly required. Also contributing to streamlining its operations were major revamping of its receiving and kitting, small parts machining, sheet metal fabrication, electrical and final assembly, and clean room areas.

Without the cooperation of its workforce which was reorganized into self-managed work teams and the establishment of true working partnerships with its suppliers, however, achieving its manufacturing goals would not have been possible, Gleason managenment says.