With high volume screw machines pumping out thousands of parts daily, Alger Manufacturing Company, Inc. (Ontario, CA) was faced with a serious cleaning problem.
As a fully integrated, precision screw machine and CNC machine tool operation, Alger promises its customers quality, competitive pricing, and on-time delivery. To satisfy delivery schedules for just-in-time operations or to ship millions of parts, the company needed an aqueous cleaning system with high performance cleaning capabilities.
Edward Robinson, maintenance manager at Alger, visited over five different cleaning-systems companies. "At the time there weren't any machines that matched what we needed. But, the people at Magnus were quite willing to work with us. We also thought the Magnus systems featured more heavy-duty construction. We particularly liked the fact that all parts of their machines in contact with water are constructed of stainless steel." Robinson also said that they liked the aggressive vertical immersion agitation with rotation cleaning action to remove the chips from blind holes, as well as the separate cleaning chambers for each process stage versus one cleaning chamber in many other systems considered by Alger before purchase of a Magnus washer.
A Mix of Parts and Materials
Started in 1957, Alger Manufacturing today keeps 150 skilled employees running 114 automatic screw machines during two 10-hour shifts. Relying on screw machines from Davenport, New Britain, Brown & Sharpe and Eubama rotary transfer machines, the company cuts stock diameters from 0.0625 in. up to 2.25 in.
Materials can include ferrous and non-ferrous workpieces, with brass accounting for 70% of the work. The remaining components Alger machines are of aluminum, free-machining steel, and stainless steel.
Environmentally Friendly Manufacturing
Alger Manufacturing had used cleaning chemicals and solvents that are now regulated or banned by the federal government. "When we used to use solvents that would evaporate so quickly there wouldn't be anything for the chips to cling to on the parts, all that was required was a little rotation to get all the chips to fall out of the part," explains Robinson. With elimination of these types of cleaning solvents, more inventive and environmentally friendly cleaning systems and methods were necessary.
The aqueous cleaning system from Magnus Equipment gives Alger the cleaning power the company was looking for, while at the same time providing a system that met environmental mandates. According to Robinson, "We evaporate the wash water using an evaporator with 75% evaporation. This leaves soap, oil, sludge, and minute chips in the bottom of the evaporator. This is collected and disposed of through regulated haulers."
New Unit on the Block
The requirements of any cleaning system installed at Alger had to include the ability to handle production demands from 500 to five million parts. The system also had to be durable enough to run 20 hours a day. And, of course, no oil and chips could be left on the parts after machining. "Customers do not want chips or oil on their parts," says Robinson. "If parts aren't clean, customers will reject them."
Magnus was more than willing to work with Alger to build the kind of cleaning system the company required. Among features needed by Alger were the combination of rotation, vertical immersion agitation, and the ability to process a high volume of parts.
Programmable Washing Cycles
Alger's Magnus Washer can accommodate 450 baskets of parts in each 10-hour shift. Baskets are 10 in. x 6 in. x 19 in. in length and are manually placed in an integrated carrier, which contains four parts baskets. They are then automatically sequenced through the washer. The next time the operator handles the parts is to load them into shipping containers.
The Magnus Mag 30 Automatic Cleaning System is an eight-stage washer with five wet stages and three dry stages. The first stage is a pre-wash that removes most of the oils and chips. This stage has a new Liquid Sweep System to remove the bulk of the chips from the wash tank and a coalescer to remove most of the oil. The second stage is a final wash with filtration and coalescing, followed by two rinses with counter-flowing and a fifth stage for rust prevention to protect the mild steel parts. This stage is skipped for brass and stainless steel parts. Each stage features an aggressive vertical immersion agitation with rotation to insure that the parts in the middle of the batch are as clean as the parts on the outside of the nested batch. The parts are nested in the basket with a fixture to prevent the parts from tumbling onto each other. The fixture also allows tumbling if needed. The dryer uses high temperatures with high air velocity and rotation to insure that all the parts are completely dry. The cycle time is two to five minutes so that approximately every three and a half minutes a parts carrier is sequenced through each stage of the process. Typically it takes 25 to 30 minutes to run a carrier through the system with carriers exiting the machine every three and a half minutes.
An important feature of this cleaning system is the separate tanks utilized for each process stage. This is a drastic departure from many of the cleaning systems that utilize one cleaning chamber for cleaning, rinsing, and drying. The separate tank approach minimizes the cross contamination within the process stages, which is a common problem for most cleaning systems.
Andy Niksa, vice president and general manager for Magnus Equipment, said that their washers are designed and built to be mechanically and process robust. "We realize that washing systems are not necessarily going to be a high priority operation in the plant. Therefore we make sure they are process robust. For precision cleaning operations we always recommend a two-stage wash system. If an operator misses doing the maintenance on the washer, we make sure our equipment will continue to clean without problems. We manufacture our washer tanks to hold a greater volume of solvent to absorb oils and to assimilate part batches that have far greater contamination than normal without breaking down the wash systems chemical balance. In an industrial system, it is not whether a part-washing problem will happen; it is when it will happen. So we design our equipment with the process robustness to manage it."
So pleased were they with the success of its Magnus system, Alger installed a similar machine to support work in the company's Arizona screw machine facility. "It is a lot smaller unit that does much the same thing," explains Robinson. "However, their part transfer between tanks is done manually. The movements during washing -- the mechanical up-and-down motion -- are the same."
