Top Dog Entry: Joel Smith, Westboro Machine Co.

The initial purchase order for this job was 200 pieces per year which consisted of milling the 4-operation piece one at a time. When the customer increased their order to 2000 per year, we needed a more efficient way to do this job. Being a small job shop, we could not afford to have a machine tied up for long periods of time. Our solution was to configure a plate that would hold 16 pieces in total with 4 pieces coming off complete per program run. The next step was to ensure the machine was running consistently so we configured a second plate so that the spindle is running almost continually. The clamping solution also allowed us to program the machine to do all the deburring and polishing on the plate that was done initially by hand. Thanks to the Mitee-Bite clamps we were able to cut down on production time and produce a higher quality, consistent looking part.