Stepping up to the challenge

27th Sep 2018, 11:53 • In Features

Located in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, USA, Ansco Machine Company is a family-owned subcontract engineering company specialising in milling and turning.

Since the business began in 1991, Ansco has machined parts primarily for customers in the steel mill, energy, automation, fluid power, liquid natural gas, oil and gas and offshore drilling industries.

Ansco initially used a simple 2D lathe CAM package. Despite its simplicity, the software served the company well until it began to expand and its needs became more complex. After outgrowing its space and moving twice, Ansco now has a 38,000ft² facility, 50 employees, 14 CNC lathes, seven horizontal machining centres, five VTLs and four vertical machining centres (VMCs).

As Ansco expanded and its projects grew larger and more complex, the company knew it needed a better way to program its large mill-turn VTL machines. “We were having to do manual code edits on every feature we made,” says applications engineer Dave Sterling, the son of Ansco owner Mike Sterling.

“I used to write main and sub programs by hand in order to use the machines’ polar interpolation feature. This was okay for straightforward parts, but having to create an individual program with hand edits for more complicated parts consumed an excessive amount of time.”

Ansco began the search for a CAM system that would allow its applications engineers to be more flexible and efficient — a process that took a few years. On several occasions, Mr Sterling and his colleagues met with Esprit president Dan Frayssinet and members of the Esprit sales team to discuss the mill-turn issues that Ansco’s current software couldn’t handle.

In the end, it was the software’s ability to program complex mill-turn parts using sub-programs that turned Ansco into an Esprit customer. “Even though we aren’t a huge customer – our initial purchase was for three seats – we got excellent service,” Mr Sterling says.

Ansco received an emergency enquiry for an order of fan-type inducers from a customer in the liquid natural gas industry. The customer needed the parts within a week. Ansco had made a few similar parts in the past, using one of five Makino horizontal machining centres, but the process was painstaking. Mr Sterling would machine one side of the part, make a nest for it, then cut the back. This method worked well enough, but it wasn’t ideal.

Ansco applications engineer Dave Sterling

The new inducers could be programmed on a horizontal machine, but the parts’ complexity would require knowledge of 5-axis machining, which Mr Sterling didn’t have. He called Esprit, and two days later, he was on a plane to Charlotte, NC, to get one-on-one training that would enable him to do 5-axis programming on Ansco’s 4-axis Makino machine. With Mr Sterling’s new training under his belt, Ansco successfully completed the order in time and went on to use the same method for a number of other parts.

That is, until Ansco needed to undercut a more complex inducer and realised that a 4-axis machine wouldn’t do the trick. The company looked at contracting the work out to another shop but ultimately invested in a DMG Mori DMU 65 monoBLOCK.

“Esprit was key in my success at 5-axis milling,” Mr Sterling says. “Right out of the box, I had a solid model of the machine, I had a pre-defined template, and I had a factory-tested post-processor. The installation engineer was sceptical at first and said: ‘No post is perfect right out of the box’ but the more parts we machined, the more we realised that the Esprit post really was just that good.

“With so many variables in programming a new machine, having a reliable post-processor is so important. The last 5-axis program I ran had 5.5 million lines of code; I couldn’t make sense of it even if I wanted to. But having a reliable simulation and a post I could count on let me focus on workholding, tooling and the actual machining of the part. If it happens on the screen in simulation, it happens on the machine. That’s huge for us.”

Ansco has had such excellent results with the DMG Mori and Esprit collaboration that it recently ordered its third 5-axis machining centre. This has allowed Ansco to move into larger and even more complex parts for a number of industries. Mr Sterling is also using Esprit to program Ansco’s five Hankook VTLs in house, as well as all of its vertical machining centres.

Having a reliable post-processor, accurate simulations and attentive customer service – not to mention the ability to easily write millions of lines of code – lowers Mr Sterling’s stress level, as well as Ansco’s engineering costs and the time it spends on projects.

Ansco can then pass these savings along to its customers. Thanks to Esprit’s features, Ansco has the edge to be more competitive than other similar companies, even when quoting for the most complex projects.

In the UK, Esprit is represented by CNC Solutions, CAM Supplies and Scotcam.