The most important capability for a turning shop is the ability to turn a profit. Bryon Bettinardi, owner of Bryco Machine in Tinley Park, Illinois, was watching this capability decline.

During the 1990s, the shop had a specialty. Small-diameter parts requiring precision turning, milling and drilling could be produced at high efficiency on the shop's bar-fed CNC Swiss-type lathes. For much of this time, says Mr. Bettinardi, there were fewer than 100 such machines in the Chicagoland area.

That is not the case anymore. He believes that the number today is about 700. As the capacity has multiplied, the profit margins for this work have gone down. The shop had to change. The problem was, the change had to be big.

It was clear what capabilities to add. Trying to run small-batch prototype jobs on the Swiss-type machines was an ongoing frustration, because the machines are at their best when running large quantities. Then there were the jobs the shop couldn't take on at all--that is, parts larger than 1.25 inch in diameter, the capacity of the largest Swiss-type in the shop. To provide a larger range of services to existing customers, Bryco needed to add both prototype machining and production machining of larger-diameter parts to its arsenal of capabilities.

However, adding too little prototyping capacity would leave the shop continuing to struggle to do some of its short runs on Swiss-types. Adding too little large-diameter capacity would be even less acceptable, because Bryco could only hope to get its customers' large-diameter business if it had the capacity to fully satisfy those needs. So Bryco went full bore (so to speak) into increasing its turning capacity.

A shop that formerly had 13 CNC turning machines added seven more in a single year. The shop also added 12,000 square feet. The total investment was $2.5 million, or about two-thirds of the shop's annual sales. All at once, Bryco became a different and significantly more complex shop. In fact, just the complexity brought its own perils.

Mr. Bettinardi could no longer gage the performance of all of his machines at a glance. Nor could he quote jobs based on his specific understanding of a particular type of turning. He needed better information to manage a bigger shop with broader capabilities. To obtain this information, he made several seemingly small changes that he now considers to have been pivotal: hiring a director of operations and technology, placing PCs on the shop floor, and expanding the shop's use of shop management software beyond payables and receivables to include shopfloor data collection.

Monitoring and responding to the shopfloor data has proven essential for quoting jobs on the new machines and keeping them producing efficiently, Mr. Bettinardi says.

However, given what he also discovered about costs and quoted prices for the Swiss-type work, it turned out that he could have benefited from having access to this more precise information all along.

Production Turning

For its new capacity in large-diameter production turning, Bryco's objective was to realize something like the production efficiency of its bar-fed Swiss-types. The shop purchased five bar-fed turning centers from Eurotech (Brooksville, Florida), all served by 6-foot bar feeders from Iemca (Bucci Industries, Charlotte, North Carolina).

The Eurotech machines have dual spindles for simultaneous machining of multiple pieces, along with dual turrets possessing live-tool capability. Bryco's different models offer 1.77- or 2.625-inch bar capacity and 8- or 10-inch chuck capacity. Two of the machines have Y-axis capability, which Bryco uses for parts requiring engraving.

One design feature of these machines that interested Mr. Bettinardi was the fact that the main spindle and subspindle are not concentric. For the part to be handed off from one spindle to the next, the subspindle travels up to meet the main spindle, then returns with the part to its lower position. The result of this design, he says, is that the turrets have more clearance to accommodate long tools.

Prototype Turning

For the prototype work, the important point for Bryco was that a prototype job's preparation time can easily exceed its machining time (certainly not the case for the shop's production jobs). For a prototype machine, cutting fast was desirable, but being able to program fast was even more valuable.

Bryco chose two TM6 CNC lathes from Hurco (Indianapolis, Indiana). One machine uses an Iemca bar feeder and the other is limited to chucking, so even prototype jobs can be sorted according to the machine that is appropriate to the nature of the part. Both machines use Hurco's own control, which can be programmed either conversationally or through CAM software.

The former option appealed to Bryco. Its Swiss-type work has long been programmed on the shop floor. Shop superintendent Ricky Hamilton has done much of this programming for Bryco, composing programs line by line near the Swiss-type machines. For production part numbers that will run for hours or days and will be ordered again, the shop can easily afford the time required to program this way. However, this is not the case for prototyping jobs, where any small run may be finished quickly, and the shop may never see that part again. Spending minimal time on programming is critical.