Modular fixturing system for in-house welding eliminates machinery manufacturer’s long lead times

Situation

Tom Onsrud, CEO and owner of CNC machinery manufacturer C.R. Onsrud, and Eric McAllister, his fabrication manager, were getting tired of waiting. Their standard practice had always been to have the frames for their 70 CNC machine models welded by an outside shop, but that process had them waiting up to 12 weeks for initial delivery. And that was a best-case scenario. If the part didn’t pass quality control once it got back to McAllister’s shop, it would have to be shipped back and they’d have to wait another month.

“When a salesman says ‘I can get a half-million-dollar order for a machine if we can deliver it in x number of weeks,’ well, then we had to get in line with the outside vendor, where a good delivery was six weeks,” said Onsrud.

He knew that the lost time was costing money, he knew exactly what the heart of the problem was, and he knew how to fix it.

“They were a good shop, but nobody cares about your stuff the way you care about it,” said Onsrud. It was that simple. The company would have to bring the welding process in-house.

Resolution

“I ran into [sales engineer] Josh Hill at the Bluco booth at IMTS. Afterwards I sent him prints to see how he’d handle our parts,” explained Onsrud.

Hill came back with a plan for modular weld fixturing—five custom tables on a floor rail system that would allow McAllister’s crew to slide them back and forth to accommodate every frame size. The plan looked promising, so Onsrud sent a base frame kit to Bluco and brought his team to test the system at the Validation Center.

“Our welders tacked it up, welded it out, changed it over to weld the bridges, and shipped it back,” Onsrud said. “When it came back to us, we machined it on our big mill, and the machinists were very impressed by how accurate it was.”

Bluco installed the system at Onsrud’s Troutman, N.C., plant, giving the company control of its own timeline.

“Now we can rearrange things and build a frame in a week. We get to prioritize, and we don’t have to worry about other customers in front of us anymore. It just makes everything run a lot smoother,” said Onsrud. It’s helping his company move toward the ultimate goal of bringing the entire manufacturing process in-house.

“We’re getting better product off the Bluco, so it’s cut way down on machining time, which is something we hadn’t thought about or anticipated,” he explained. “I’m getting reports back from machinists that they’re saving one to two hours on each base because of the accuracy we can achieve on the Bluco tables,” McAllister added. On machines that cost $400 an hour to run, those savings add up.

With so many different parts to make, McAllister’s team is constantly changing over the fixturing, and the modular components help speed that process. “When we do runs of three to six at a time, once we set up, it’s so much easier to loosen the angles, slide them back, remove the part, put a new one in and boom—we’re back together again instead of breaking down the fixture every time,” he explained.

The company has since installed a second floor rail system to minimize downtime further.

“We got into this because of the frustration of long lead times,” Onsrud said, “but we ended up getting a better product faster.”