Success on Tap for Mountain Empire Anodizing and Metal Finishing
(Wapakoneta, OH) – Mountain Empire Anodizing and Metal Finishing is playing the long game. They attract customers with their capabilities and fair pricing, then with excellent service, generally keep them forever. They also boast the longest anodizing tanks in the southeast, a 40-footer, which helps them to win business coating lengthy products like stadium seats, aviation and marine components, handrails, flagpoles, extrusions, architectural products, and more. Holding those workpieces requires extensive fixturing which in turn requires a lot of drilling and tapping. Owner Charlie Roe credits his FlexArm tapping arm with helping him to tap those holes quickly and efficiently.
Mountain Empire typically works with smaller size holes - often 1024’s and 832’s, which they were tapping with their CNC. But a discussion that he had at Precision Technologies, a machine shop that he’d recently purchased changed Roe’s viewpoint on online versus offline tapping. The company had a pair of FlexArm units that they talked up and demonstrated to Roe, making him a believer. So, when Roe won a big project, tapping 517 10-32 holes in aluminum and steel, he purchased a FlexArm for the Mountain Empire location, and was amazed at how much faster taping offline really is.
“It is 10-times faster,” he recalls, adding that “the FlexArm paid for itself with that first job.”
At a billing rate of $75 per hour, that speed advantage quickly adds up to bottom line savings.
“Now we keep our CNC running on other jobs, and we use the FlexArm to tap offline,” continued Roe, “so it’s like running two jobs at the same time.”
Roe especially appreciates how easy it is to operate the FlexArm, saying “You don’t need to be a machinist, anyone can operate it.”
In addition to getting the jobs done faster by tapping offline, allowing non-machinists to run the FlexArm enhances Mountain Empire’s overall efficiency and helps to control costs.
The speed is great, and Roe’s crews aren’t scrapping fixtures any more. Previously when a hole was cross-threaded or a tap broke within the fixture, that fixture was likely going to be discarded. Although they are producing the fixturing in-house, scrapping damaged fixtures was a waste of the time invested in them to that point, along with the raw cost of materials.
Tapping, Not Scrapping
FlexArm tapping arms are designed to make tapping easy and quick. Adjustable gas counter-balanced springs allow an operator to position the tap over a hole without straining or fatigue. The tool absorbs the torque created by the motor, increasing tap accuracy. The pneumatic model A-32 which Mountain Empire purchased has a 400 RPM motor that delivers 28 ft/lbs of torque, and has 9/16” tap capacity.
An adjustable torque clutch allows the tap to stop turning when it encounters any obstruction that might cause breakage, significantly reducing the likelihood of breaking a tap. While a CNC machine averages a broken tap every 300 holes, a FlexArm can go 3,000 holes without breaking a tap.
That first job was an eye-opener for Roe and his team. Now they rarely tap anything on their CNC, preferring to utilize it for value added steps for which it is best suited. They perform all of the tapping operations offline, using an operator rather than a machinist. With their FlexArm placed on a cart for easy transport within the shop, they take the cart to the workpiece, drill, tap and go on to the next project.
The workload varies with the projects, and Roe estimates that they tap from 25 to 200 holes a week. Whether they are tapping numerous holes in a complicated fixture to hold an aerospace cowling, or whether they are tapping a single hole in a component for the Metal Finishing division, virtually all of the tapping goes through the FlexArm.
Efficiency is key for Charlie Roe and the team at Mountain Empire Anodizing and Metal Finishing, because it allows them to secure more projects from the various assorted industries that they serve. Whether he’s anodizing lengthy components like handrails, architectural metalwork, aerospace and marine components, flagpoles and more, keeping customers satisfied with fair pricing and excellent service. After all, Charlie Roe, is playing the long game, in more ways than 1. His FlexArm A-32 and the Southeast’s longest anodizing tank are two tools that are helping him win it.
