A roller attached to the lever arm is shaped near the outer diameter of the rotating part.The basic tool elements required for most spinning operations include the mandrel, the follower that holds the metal, the rollers and lever arms that form the part, and the dressing tool.Image: Toledo Metal Spinning Company.
The evolution of Toledo Metal Spinning Co.’s product portfolio may not be typical, but it is not unique in the metal forming and fabrication shop space.The Toledo, Ohio-based store started making custom pieces and became known for producing certain types of products.As demand increased, it introduced several standard products based on popular configurations.
Combining make-to-order and make-to-stock work helps balance store loads.Duplication of work also opens the door to robotics and other types of automation.Revenues and profits rose, and the world seemed to be doing fine.
But is the business growing as fast as possible?The leaders of the 45-employee store knew the organization had more potential, especially when they saw how sales engineers spent their days.Although TMS offers multiple product lines, many products cannot simply be taken from finished goods inventory and shipped.They are configured to order.This means that sales engineers spend a lot of time preparing the paperwork for hopper orders, specifying ferrules here and specific accessories or polishes here.
TMS actually has an engineering constraint, and to get rid of it, this year the company introduced a product configuration system.Custom software designed on top of SolidWorks allows customers to configure their own products and receive quotes online.This front-office automation should simplify order processing and, most importantly, allow sales engineers to handle more custom work for free.In short, the tool should help improve quoting and engineering efficiency, which is a good thing.After all, the less efficient the engineering and quoting, the harder it is for a store to grow.
The history of TMS dates back to the 1920s and a German immigrant named Rudolph Bruehner.He owned the company from 1929 to 1964, employing skilled metal spinners who had years of experience working with lathes and levers, perfecting the spinning process.The lathe rotates the blank, and the metal spinner uses a lever to press the rollers against the workpiece, making it form against the mandrel.
TMS eventually expanded into deep drawing, producing stamped parts as well as preforms for spinning.A stretcher punches a preform and mounts it on a rotary lathe.Starting with a preform rather than a flat blank allows the material to be spun to greater depths and smaller diameters.
Today, TMS is still a family business, but it is not a Bruehner family business.The company changed hands in 1964, when Bruehner sold it to Ken and Bill Fankauser, not lifelong sheet metal workers from the old country, but an engineer and an accountant.Ken’s son, Eric Fankhauser, now vice president of TMS, tells the story.
“As a young accountant, my dad got the [TMS] account from a friend who worked at Ernst and Ernst accounting firm. My dad audited factories and companies and he did a great job, Rudy gave He sent a check for $100. This got my dad in a bind. If he cashed that check, it would be a conflict of interest. So he went to Ernst and Ernst’s partners and asked what to do, and they told him to put Endorsed the check to a partner. He did it and when the check cleared Rudy was really upset to see him endorsed to the company. He called my dad to his office and told him he was upset He didn’t keep the money. My father explained to him that it was a conflict of interest.
“Rudy thought about it and finally said, ‘You’re the kind of person I wish I owned this company. Are you interested in buying it?
Ken Fankhauser thought about it, then called his brother Bill, who was then an aerospace engineer at Boeing in Seattle.As Eric recalls, “My Uncle Bill flew in and looked at the company and they decided to buy it. The rest is history.”
This year, an online product configurator to configure products to order for multiple TMSs has helped streamline workflows and improve customer experience.
When Ken and Bill bought TMS in the 1960s, they owned a shop full of vintage belt-driven machines.But they also come at a time when metal spinning (and manufacturing machinery in general) is moving from manual operation to programmable control.
In the 1960s, the pair purchased a Leifeld stencil-driven rotary lathe, roughly similar to an old stencil-driven punch press.The operator manipulates a joystick that drives the stylus on a template in the shape of a rotating part.”This is the beginning of TMS automation,” said Eric’s brother, Craig, who is now TMS’s vice president of sales.
The company’s technology advanced through different types of template-driven rotary lathes, culminating in the computer-controlled machines that factories use today.Still, several aspects of metal spinning set it apart from other processes.First, even the most modern systems cannot be run successfully by someone who does not know the basics of spinning.
“You can’t just put a blank and have the machine automatically rotate the part based on the drawing,” Eric said, adding that operators need to create new part programs by manipulating a joystick that adjusts the roller position during manufacturing through work.It is usually done multiple passes, but it can be done just once, such as in a shear forming operation, where the material can be thinned (or “sheared”) to half its thickness.The metal itself “grows” or elongates in the direction of rotation.
“Each type of metal is different, and there are differences even within the same metal, including hardness and tensile strength,” Craig said.“Not only that, the metal heats up as it spins, and that heat is then transferred to the tool. As the steel heats up, it expands. All these variables mean that skilled operators need to keep an eye on the job.”
A TMS employee has followed the work for 67 years.”His name was Al,” Eric said, “and he didn’t retire until he was 86.” Al started when the shop lathe was running from a belt attached to an overhead shaft.He retired from a shop with the latest programmable spinners.
Today, the factory has some employees who have been with the company for more than 30 years, others more than 20 years, and those trained in the spinning process work in both manual and automated processes.If the shop needs to produce some simple one-off spinning parts, it still makes sense for a spinner to start a manual lathe.
Still, the company is an active adopter of automation, as evidenced by its use of robotics in grinding and polishing.”We have three robots in-house doing the polishing,” Eric said.”Two of them are designed for polishing on the vertical axis and one on the horizontal axis.”
The shop employs a robotics engineer who teaches each robot to grind specific shapes using finger-strap (Dynabrade-type) tools, as well as various other belt grinders.Programming a robot is a delicate matter, especially given the different granularities involved, the number of passes, and the different pressures the robot applies.
The company still employs people who do hand polishing, especially custom work.It also employs welders who perform circumferential and seam welding, as well as welders who operate planers, a process that not only improves weld quality but also complements rotation.The rollers of the skin passer strengthen and flatten the weld bead, which helps maintain process consistency when subsequent rotations are required.
TMS was a pure machine shop until 1988, when the company developed a standard line of conical hoppers.“We realized that, especially in the plastics industry, we would receive different requests for hopper pricing that would only be slightly different—eight inches here, quarter inches there,” Eric said.“So we started with a 24-inch. Conical hopper with a 60-degree angle, developed the stretch spinning process [deep draw the preform, then spin] for it, and built the product line from there.” We had several Ten hopper sizes, we produce about 50 to 100 at a time.This means we don’t have expensive setups to amortize and customers don’t have to pay for tools.It’s just on the shelf and we can ship it the next day.Or we can do some extra work, like putting a ferrule or collar, or a sight glass, all of which involve some auxiliary manipulation.”
Another product line, called the Cleaning Line, includes a range of stainless steel waste containers.This product idea comes from all over the place, the car wash industry.
“We make a lot of car wash vacuum domes,” Eric said, “and we wanted to take that dome down and do something else with it. We have a design patent on CleanLine and we’ve sold 20 Years.” The bottoms of these vessels are drawn, the body is rolled and welded, the top dome is drawn, followed by crimping, a rotary process that creates a rolled edge on the workpiece, similar to Reinforced ribs.
Hoppers and Clean Line products are available in different levels of “standard”.Internally, the company defines a “standard product” as one that can be taken off the shelf and shipped.But again, the company also has “standard custom products,” which are partially made from stock and then configured to order.This is where software-based product configurators play a key role.
“We really want our customers to see the product and see the configuration, mounting flanges and finishes they’re asking for,” said Maggie Shaffer, marketing manager leading the configurator program.”We want customers to be able to understand the product intuitively.”
At the time of this writing, the configurator displays the product configuration with the selected options and gives a 24-hour price.(Like many manufacturers, TMS could hold its prices longer in the past, but can’t now, thanks to volatile material prices and availability.) The company hopes to add payment processing capacity in the future.
As of now, customers call the store to fulfill their orders.But instead of spending days or even weeks generating, organizing, and getting approvals for drawings (often waiting too long in an overflowing inbox), TMS engineers can generate drawings with just a few clicks, and then Send information to the workshop immediately.
From a customer’s perspective, improvements to metal spinning machinery or even robotic grinding and polishing may be completely invisible.However, the product configurator is an improvement that customers can see.It improves their buying experience and saves TMS days or even weeks of order processing time.It’s not a bad combination.
Tim Heston, Senior Editor at The FABRICATOR, has covered the metal fabrication industry since 1998, beginning his career with the American Welding Society’s Welding Magazine.Since then, he has covered all metal fabrication processes from stamping, bending and cutting to grinding and polishing.He joined The FABRICATOR staff in October 2007.
FABRICATOR is North America’s leading metal forming and fabrication industry magazine.The magazine provides news, technical articles and case histories that enable manufacturers to do their jobs more efficiently.FABRICATOR has been serving the industry since 1970.
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