Western Pegasus is a full-service supplier of customized spline gauges, master gears, and spline-related inspection gauging. Their gauges are designed and built to customer part specifications in accordance with the required national, international, and corporate requirements. Western Pegasus supplies gauges globally to leaders in the automotive, aerospace, agricultural, and marine industries. In August, They Celebrated their 30th anniversary. “Western Pegasus was not founded in the traditional way,” said Andy Wincel, the company’s new president. “Western Spline Gage was started initially as a sales agency, buying spline gauges and master gears from various sources. In 1982, they started sourcing from a company called Pegasus Spline Gauge out of Birmingham, England–where we’re still manufacturing today. In August of 1983, they made a joint arrangement that they would exclusively work together. By 1993, both Western Spline Gage and Pegasus Spline Gauge were under the same ownership. I started in 2001 in marketing and recognizing the global market place, the decision was made to operate both companies under the Western Pegasus banner. In 2003, I moved to operations, and in 2006, I became responsible for all daily activities of the company, culminating in my purchase of the company last December.”
Western Pegasus’ goal is simple: to be problem-solving experts. “If there’s a spline, and a customer needs a solution to measure, we are eager to work with our customers,” said Wincel. “If you can give us a datum, we can come up with a solution.”They’ve got the experience to back that claim up. The company’s junior engineer has 18 years of experience in spline gauge design–the senior engineer has well over 30. And they are excited by their newest addition, successfully recruiting Paul Nel as the new vice president and general manager from Dana Corporation, where Paul served as the global spline manager.
“One thing we’ve learned,” said Wincel, “is that our customers’ customers are increasingly demanding, so we’re constantly presented with new challenges and the need to differentiate ourselves to our customers. Along that line, we are happy to announce that, starting in January, we will be offering spline training seminars to our customers free of charge. On the manufacturing side, of course, we do plenty of ring and plug gauges and even standard ring-and-plug gauges are custom made–there’s nothing ‚Äòoff the shelf.’ Our engineering team loves to sink their teeth into the custom gauges, though. Our passion is the more exciting and challenging stuff. If one customer needs it, chances are there’s another customer out there who needs it.”
Western Pegasus mainly serves the automotive industry; the rest of their business is made up of aerospace, off-highway, agriculture, and even small things like splines on washing machines.Every gauge comes ISO 9001-accredited. “Standard certifications and drawings are provided free of charge,” Wincel explained. “It never made much sense to charge for a drawing, because I can’t make it until I have a drawing. And I can’t ship it without certifying it, so why not print another copy and provide it to the customer? If the customer requires the higher standard to trace it to the 17025 standards, we’re able to do that, too. When ISO comes up with a new standard, we’ll jump through that hoop to make that happen as well.
“Everything that we do from there on out is an offshoot of different types of information needed when measuring splines,” Wincel explained. “Aside from standard spline gauges, we offer a complete line of spline gauging, including taper master plugs to check wear of ring gauges and ensure gauge continuity in future rings–the same TMP is used to manufacture future ring gauges. We also offer concentricity gauges and spline arbors to check run-out, as well as variable indicating gauges to check tooth-thickness or dimension between or over pins. Again, if there is a spline and an attribute you want to check, we will figure out a way to check it. In the past, we have designed and built a wide range of custom fixtures.”In addition to the gauges they offer, Western Pegasus is a full-service, problem-solving team, happy to do plant analysis to see what a customer’s spline needs are, or evaluate their current gauging processes. Wincel explained that this isn’t a sales call: it’s engineering support.
“We’re proud of our capablilites and advancements in the last ten years. We’ve doubled our manufacturing space capacity. We’re in the process of implementing another capital expenditure, that will increase our current capacity by an additional 20 percent, and, through working with steel and coating suppliers, we are happy to introduce three new materials to give our splines longer wear life–cost pressures being what they are. Each of the three materials will be treated with a specific coating and are only being introduced after years of real world tests and proven results. It was a challenge to find the proper balance between material hardness, wear resistance, even coating distribution, heat treat process, and the ability to grind in the splines.”
In 2001 the company undertook its first major expansion: all manufacturing machines were rebuilt and a new production control system was implemented. They would expand twice in the next ten years, doubling manufacturing space to support new, specialized production techniques. Their most recent expansion included modernizing the wire EDM department, as well as advances in R&D work on new and existing production lines.Wincel concluded by saying, “Our ultimate goal is: when people think of spline gauges, they think of us. I am confident that our investments in people, manufacturing capacity, product development, and creative cost saving solutions for our customers have us off to a good start to achieving that goal.”
MORE INFO www.westpeg.com or call 616-393-9580
