Fabrication Shop - PLC Programming, Industrial Controls, Machine And Tool Design

Multi-spindle drill press tooling

After Kenneth left an after market and OEM auto parts manufacturer, where he worked as a manufacturing engineer, he was contracted to design some tooling for a multi-spindle drill press. The Natco drill press was used in manufacturing steering linkages for Ford Motor Company. The Natco was used to drill a hole in the boss of a drag link. The drag link was then flipped over and a tapered reamer was used to ream the hole. The Natco produced four finished parts every machine cycle. While Kenneth was working at the parts manufacturer, he designed a quick change fixture for the Natco. The quick change tooling was in place when he left.

SCOPE: Design 4 spindle Natco tooling for the Ford F250 4x4 drag link with the following goals:

a.) Quick change tooling

b.) No reamer depth setting change necessary

RESULTS: As was said before, Kenneth had already designed a set of quick change tooling for the Natco. He did this by mounting all of the various tooling components on a common aluminum plate. This plate was positioned by using existing locator pins mounted on the Natco’s bolster plate. The plate was held in position by some quick release clamps. The various tooling components were already mounted on a piece of cold roll plate, but the plate did not utilize any sort of locator pins other than cap screws. To reduce the weight that the operator would have to lift Kenneth used hard anodized aluminum. The aluminum mounting plate was sized to utilize the existing locator pins. To design the tooling for the F250, he utilized the same design for the aluminum mounting plate.

One of the critical elements with the drilling and reaming process is the depth control of the reamer. This dimension has a life and limb designation from Ford on the part print. To get this dimension within tolerance, it was a time and part consuming process. With the tooling for the F250, Kenneth standardized the boss rest height. This eliminated the need to adjust the reamer depths and thus reduced the wasted time and scrap parts. Kenneth provided the customer with Auto-CAD detailed drawings with their title block on floppy disk, a complete bill of materials, drawing prints and complete documentation.