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Forest City Gear Acquires Three New Haas Turning Centers to Produce “Donuts” for its Gearmaking Operations

FOREST CITY GEAR EXPANDS BLANKING DEPARTMENT

 Leading gear manufacturer acquires three new Haas turning centers to produce “donuts” for its gearmaking operations

Forest City Gear’s blanking department now boasts a Haas ST-10 and two ST-20 Turning Centers. These machines were acquired recently to improve the throughput at Forest City Gear, a world leader in fine- and medium-pitch gear and spline work. The machines are used primarily for production of “donuts”, the near net blanks used in the company’s gearmaking operations.

Roscoe, IL-Forest City Gear has acquired three Haas turning centers to improve the throughput at its gearmaking facility.  The company has made this investment, according to President Wendy Young, “…because we needed to better control our throughput and reduce the time to start up jobs.  We were experiencing some severe delays from outside vendors and we saw problems on the horizon from such bottlenecks.  Our company is always on the lookout for such conditions, because both our quality and our delivery protocols are vital to our success with current and potential customers in the world market.”  These new machines will be used in the company’s Blanking Department, headed by Tommy Kalt, who detailed the new machines.

“We purchased a Haas ST-10 Turning Center with a magazine bar feeder, 300 PSI high-pressure coolant system and automatic tool presetter.  It’s a fast, very flexible and very easy-to-use machine tool.”  This machine, as well as two Haas ST-20 Turning Centers with 8” chuck and 20-station hybrid turret, fully programmable tailstock and high-pressure coolant pump, are currently operating in the Forest City Gear facility to produce “donuts” from automatically fed bar stock.  These donuts are the near net shape blanks used in the gearmaking operation here.  As a custom producer of extremely tight tolerance gears for the most demanding applications, according to company CEO Fred Young, “We need to have optimum control of our operation, at every step.  Our company today exports gears to every corner of the world and our rigorous quality standards require a number of intermediate steps, prior to shipment.  If the blanks are not available and our production is delayed, the entire operation slows and we simply will not allow that to happen,” Young stated emphatically.

Kalt expands on the ST-10.  “It has a manual, programmable tailstock for shaft work, another real advantage in our type of shop, where we do a lot of splines in addition to gears.  Plus, the Haas CNC system is very easy to learn and to use.  It has simple language commands and most operations can be done with the push of a button.  I like to say it has an American-made feel to it.  The work area is open, the tooling is easy to change and the learning curve was really short for our guys.  They were up and making good parts almost immediately.”  He noted that the performance of the first machine led quickly to the purchase of the two additional Haas ST-20 turning machines.  Kalt also cited the ECO CNC system on the Haas machines, with minimal lubrication requirements and auto-power down features were in sync with the Forest City Gear green initiative programs, as a further value to this purchase.

On the business side, Wendy Young was very satisfied with the cooperation of the Haas sales and delivery team.  “We were treated fairly and the support has been first-rate, right from the start.  We already see the benefits of this purchase to our company.”

For more information on this story, please contact: FOREST CITY GEAR CO., INC. 11715 Main Street Roscoe, IL 61073-0080 Phone:  815-623-2168 Fax:  815-623-6620 Web:  www.forestcitygear.com

Email:  wyoung@forestcitygear.com Attention:  Wendy Young, President

PR agency contact for Forest City Gear: Tim Daro Bernard & Company 847-934-4500 tdaro@bernardandcompany.com