Whatās a typical day like for you at James Engineering?
I usually get up and get in here a couple of hours ahead of everyone, so I can have my time when itās peaceful and quiet. Iām not always working, but Iām usually thinking and planning the day out. I do the design work. I also spend a lot of time in the day running around making sure things are happening the way I expect them to.
If Iām designing something, Iāll be back in my corner drawing on paper, and Iāll interface with the guys in the design department to get it digitally converted into 3D solid models. Weāre a smaller company ā weāve been double our current size in years past. But weāre now implementing a plan to move far beyond our past accomplishments. We build some complicated machines and manufacture more than 2,000 parts in-house. This strategy is nurtured through growth. Weāre able to do more, not less, designing and building of our machines. The goal is to give our customers what they really need using the most direct and efficient means possible.
How would you describe your overall philosophy when it comes to the industry?
If Iām not an asset to my customers, then Iām probably a liability. I fundamentally try to be an asset. With that being said, I try to build machines that will perform, not just the deburring that they need to do, but to do it efficiently and fast enough to where Iām actually saving them money by making that process friendly and fast and efficient.
Some of the deburring I see out there, itās really a liability, because it looks terrible. Weāve always tried to be on the leading edge of quality. Recently, weāve added surface finishing. Weāre able to surface finish the whole part with the MAX System. Thatās a bigger value-add. When you get a part thatās done on the MAX ā the chamfering, the deburring, and the surface finishing ā the overall quality of the part is far superior. Thatās another asset to my customer.
What sets James Engineering apart from its competition when it comes to gear manufacturing?
Iām creative at building new machines that do a better job. As I build machines, I find areas that are lacking or tools that arenāt powerful enough. Iāve got patents on motors that we use in our systems and things that allow me to do the job better and faster. Thatās one of the assets I give my customers. I can deburr a part very quickly.
The first thing I brought to the industry was multiple operations happening concurrently during the deburring cycle. Before, you had to run the part through the machine multiple times to do two or three operations, and it wasnāt efficient. We tried to optimize the deburring and chamfering capability and now weāre adding surface finishing to it. Weāre always trying to improve the process.
What other innovations make James Engineering a leader in the gear industry?
I take all my ideas, and I try to formulate them into a machine that is as flexible as it can be, so we can do multiple things within a cycle.
On the ergonomic side of it, Iāve seen a lot of deburring machines where I canāt get my head in to see what Iām doing. The openings are too small, or you have to get too contorted to get in and try to make changes. My dad was an automobile mechanic. The one thing I hated was getting on a creeper and crawling underneath the car because everything fell in your eyes. Probably from that young age, Iāve always wanted to be in a good work position.
Now, with our machines, theyāre not only ergonomic to get up and work on, but weāve brought the computer into it. Through computer programming, weāve brought repeatable processing back with the select ENTER, cycle-start capability of computers. Itās a game changer to the industry.
Where do you see the gear industry in the next 10 years or more and your place in that future?
In general, weāre going to see gears get smaller, tighter, with more accuracy and better metallurgy coming, especially with the ability of some of the powder metals where we can deal a mixing of dissimilar materials in a powder-press format. Vapor deposition coatings are also going to be huge. It is huge now, but itās going to just continue to get bigger.
Gear deburring has always been a necessary evil. We make gears, and because of that, people like me have built gear deburring machines. Through the years, gears have been defined as being round for the most part. The burrs usually have also been confined to the outer edges. But advances in machine designs have changed all of that.
When it comes to non-gear parts, there isnāt really a machine out there that does that, short of mass finishing, and mass finishing erodes precision-part dimensions and designs.
With the MAX System, we are capable of deburring non-gear parts and the many new gear designs. It isnāt that weāre going to get away from gears, weāre going to be as important to gears as weāve ever been, but we now have a machine thatās capable of going and doing the cases the gears go in, the shafts that the gears go on ā all of this type of stuff.
You go into a CNC shop of medium size now, and you usually see the operators standing there with a piece of sandpaper, sand deburring parts during cycles.
If we can automate that process, then an operator can run two or maybe three machines or do more valuable work and less repetitive hand work. Iām hoping I can bring some automated deburring to general machining. A lot of my customers make parts besides gears.ā