Gear Manufacturer Sinks Teeth into Competitive Strategy

Bore-honing gives an edge over the competition.

Forest City Gear President Fred Young has a straightforward strategy for acquiring and retaining business: always give the customer a higher level of quality and performance than specified, but do it without adding much cost or time to the job. "We do everything we can to distinguish our product, and do it inexpensively," he emphasizes. "On bore-type gears, we have found that honing the bore is a good way to improve quality in the areas of size, roundness, straightness, and finish, without adding a lot of extra cost. The customer notices the difference in a smoother, quieter, more efficient drive."

Depending on the production needs for a specific gear, Forest City Gear hones at various points in the manufacturing process using three different systems. One of those systems, a fully automated vertical machine, uses Sunnen's Krossgrinding tools to control bore size down to 0.00005", Young highlights. In terms of finish, the hones can achieve a 16µ"or better finish, as required.

"We reinvest heavily in equipment and training to get the best performance from our resources," Young says. The company's 42 employees produce fine and medium pitch custom gears, such as internal, spline, sprocket, helical, spur, and worms/worm gears at quality levels as high as AGMA 15 (DiN 2-3). Maximum OD on most parts is 20", except for worms (5") and worm gears (16").

The company has its gears in planes made by Boeing, Airbus, Cessna, and Beechcraft as well as the space shuttle, the space station, Martian rover vehicles, and the Abrams tank. About 30% of the work is aerospace related, 5% to 10% medical, 5% military, and the remainder is industrial or instrument work. Part runs range from one to several hundred thousand. Typical materials include 12L14, 1215, 8620, 9310, and various stainless grades, as well as aluminum, bronze, brass, Inconel, Hastelloy, titanium, plastics, wood fiber, and powdered metal.

An autoloading fixture can run more than 30 different parts, and allows correction of perpendicularity, if needed. Small bore gears in photo are being honed with the Sunnen CGT Krossgrinding tool.

One of Forest City Gear's core products is the pump gear, which starts as a flat, washer-type blank made on a screw machine. "These gears operate in a small housing, so any perpendicularity error in a shaft-mounted gear causes wobble, loss of efficiency, noise, and increased friction," says Young.

"An adage of gear making is that a gear can be no more accurate than the blank with which you start. On a bore-type gear, this means starting with parallel faces and a perpendicular, round bore with parallel walls, and no taper or belling. Our minimum standard is µ0.0005" for parallelism and perpendicularity, and we'll work to tighter tolerances as circumstances require."

The pump gear blanks are double-disc ground for face parallelism and width, then re-bored on an automated boring lathe to re-qualify the perpendicularity. "We leave some stock in the bore, because it is much easier to control absolute size on a hone than it is on a lathe," Young adds. These blanks are stack hobbed, grouped on an arbor in quantities based on 4X the diameter of the bore, divided by the face width of the part. "If you don't have good parallelism and perpendicularity, it can introduce lead error in cutting the gear, or it forces a reduction in the number of blanks on the arbor, eroding your production efficiency," he explains.

Spur pump gears are typical parts honed by Forest City Gear. Keyways, blind (as in left foreground), or standard, are common features where honing helps remove burrs while producing final hole size and finish.

Pump gears often have a standard keyway or a blind-hole keyway added that must align with a tooth. "When we cut that keyway, it throws up a tiny burr, so honing for final size allows us to clean up that burr, too," says Young. "This is where honing really shines, allowing us to control final size automatically down to a few microns, a fraction of our allowed tolerance. Honing also leaves a crosshatch pattern on the bore surface, which helps to maintain a film of lubrication for gears that rotate on a shaft."

Young explains that the 0.500" tolerance on the bore size shrinks to 0.300" or less when Six Sigma quality requirements are imposed. "Our real working tolerance is much smaller than the print spec, if we are shooting for a Cpk of 2 or better, which we often achieve," Young says. "In fact, we have run capability studies where we've hit double-digit Cpk levels when honing for bore size, and we consider it a less expensive and temperamental process than ID grinding." Honing, in fact, is a less costly process, with an automated single-spindle hone typically costing 50% to 75% less than an ID grinder, according to Rich Moellenberg, manager of Sunnen's custom products group.

"With automated honing, we can easily hit tolerances of 0.200" to 0.000005", so the gear is going to roll more smoothly, more quietly, with less vibration, and probably last longer," Young stresses. "There will be a perceived improvement the customer can sense, even without sophisticated measuring equipment. This establishes high customer expectations that are difficult for competitors to meet."

Responsibility for building those expectations falls to Forest City Gear's three honing systems from Sunnen Products: a new fully automated vertical SV-1005 system, and two older EC-3500 machines. The new SV-1005 machine has a rotary table with two workholding positions fed by a robot loading system, ensuring high "in cut" times. "We use Sunnen's Krossgrinding tools on this machine because they wear very little and, thus, require minimal adjustment," Young explains. Krossgrinding tools combine the traditional expanding-mandrel design with a long-wearing, diamond-plated sleeve, so they operate much like a traditional honing tool with stones. Krossgrinding tools can control accuracies to µ0.00004" (1µm) for straightness, roundness, and hole size. "We get a tool life of about 250,000 parts, depending on the material, while typically removing 0.0020" to 0.0030" of stock at cycle times of 15 seconds," Young says.

One of the two EC-3500 power-stroked hones has an auto loading system. These machines allow feedrate, stroke length, and stroke speed to be set at the control. Sensing probes monitor bore size and automatically end the cycle when the bore hits the specified size. The control also has capability for automatic stone wear compensation and two-stage feed pressure, which allows cycle time reduction by removing most stock at a higher feed pressure, then finishing at lower pressure. "We use CBN and aluminum oxide tooling on these machines in several different configurations, depending whether the bore is blind, keyed, etc.," Young explains.

A large bore gear is about to be honed with the Sunnen CGT Krossgrinding tool.

Honing at various points in manufacturing depends on the part being produced. Parts are typically honed after hobbing, but on extremely critical gears, blanks might be honed before and after cutting. "If we have a very tight tolerance situation and want better sizing than we can get by boring on the lathe, we might hone before cutting, as well as after," Young says. "Fixturing on the hones also allows some degree of control and correction of perpendicularity, should we need to do that. If parts are heat treated, they are honed afterward to correct for the slight shrinkage in bore size. And if there is a plating operation, we have found it is easier to remove plating from the bore using a hone than it is to mask the part for plating."

Forest City Gear devised a clever way to check the functional perpendicularity on bored gears that involves grinding almost all the taper out of a lathe mandrel, which then allows the gear to fit snuggly on it without tipping. With the mandrel mounted between centers and an indicator on the periphery of the gear, any perpendicularity error shows up when the gear is rotated.

No matter what the part print specifies, all customers want quieter drives, smoother operation, and greater efficiency, Young says.

Sunnen Products Company
St. Louis, MO
sunnen.com

Forest City Gear
Roscoe, IL
forestcitygear.com