Ohio Broach helps European manufacturer with a custom-designed bearing machine

A bearing manufacturer in Europe benefited from Ohio Broach's skills and services.

For close to 65 years, The Ohio Broach & Machine Company has worked with a wide range of industrial applications in the broaching field. The company’s services have brought on many success stories – including a manufacturer in Europe that approached it for a customized bearing machine.

The customer needed the machine to produce engine crankshaft thrust bearings for the automotive industry. With decades’ worth of top machine-building skills, Ohio Broach met the challenge.

Fourteen hundred parts an hour

This European company manufactured bearings through a process that involved stamping parts from presses near a broaching machine and then loading them into a double-station magazine that carried about 20 minutes’ worth of parts in the machine. The equipment would strip the bottom part of every magazine from the full part stack and push the parts through two broach tunnels, in which broaching tools would remove stock and hold parts flat while maintaining a surface finish of no more than 1.2 Ra.

Next, the parts exited the tunnels into an unloading area and moved down chutes to a collection area. The fixtures returned to the first station, and the cycle restarted. This cycle would continue until the magazines were low, the parts fed into the broach tools incorrectly, or nobody was removing the parts from the chute exit area.

To tackle this project, Ohio Broach built a specialized “Ohio” H218X horizontal broaching machine. This customized bearing machine had two tons of cutting force and 18 inches of cutting stroke, as well as tandem stations. It was a hydraulically driven machine with a dual parallel hydraulic system in which one side could run independently of the other. The integral coolant pump and reservoir supplied coolant to the broach cutters.

A PLC controlled this bearing machine, which could broach up to 1,400 parts an hour and could handle up to 40,000 parts between sharpening tasks, depending on the size and material. This turned out to be the perfect solution for the customer, which benefited with improved competitive ability and efficiency. Once again, Ohio Broach had the solution.

To learn more, contact Ohio Broach.

• Tweet