smarter, develop processes for efficiency,
and eliminate excess costs, and the best
way to achieve that is to get all parties
involved as early as possible, ideally from
the concept stage.”
This isn’t to say that RPC didn’t have
to deal with a problem or two along the
way. For example, despite keeping the
raw material’s chemistry restricted to half
the normal tolerances, the amount of
elongation still varies from heat to heat.
RPC determined that the most ductile
heats of the material used for this project
have elongation properties that vary
from 35 percent to 50 percent. To deal
with this, it developed four bending pro-
grams tailored to handle various elonga-
tions in increments of 5 percent. Still,
troubleshooting this problem wasn’t as
difficult as it would have been without
the information exchange upfront.
Bending the tube was just one portion
of the project, of course. Williams and
the staff at RPC had to visit the OEM
on a number of occasions; develop the
entire fabrication process, including
drilling and machining (see Figure 5);
engineer the fixtures for drilling, machining, and verifying the dimensions of
the tube; purchase the bender and tooling; haul a load of the raw material to
SMT’s facility in Ohio to run off several
hundred parts; ship those parts to the
customer for evaluation; then get the
workcell set up and running back in
Rockford.
Not bad for a project with a 10-week
time line.
Eric Lundin can be
ericl@thefabricator.com.
reached at
GL Precision Tube Inc., 237 S. Highland
Ave., Aurora, IL 60506, 630-859-8940,
www.glptube.com
KCS Industrial Sales Inc., 1550 Elmwood
Road, Rockford, IL 61103, 815-877-
3624, il@kcsind.com
Rockford Process Control Inc., 2020
Enter reader service code 122937 at www.ffid.net
A TPA PUBLICATION
MARCH 2010 • TPJ 23
