During the cutting process for gears, the chips that are stripped away from the final piece need to be transported from the machining process. The same can be said for the lubricants and cooling agents that may get contaminated by the gear’s leftovers.
The experts behind Jorgensen Conveyors and Filtration Solutions have been providing conveyor equipment to ensure the chips and other detritus from all types of applications — including gear manufacturing — are properly managed and maintained.
“I’ll say we’re agnostic on who we try to cater to; we’re really more about looking at the chip type and the application and then the coolant agent that’s being used for the cutting process,” said Karl Kleppek, president and COO of Jorgensen Conveyors and Filtration Solutions. “I look at gear cutting, hobbing, and even grinding. It’s a mix of the same types of chips you might see coming out of milling or grinding — not as much on the turning side unless you’re flanking. We have a number of conveyor types to serve the gear industry. We manufacture lot of hinge steel belt conveyors. We offer a lot of scraper type conveyors. We have a special conveyor that’s a scraper type, but it also has a magnet on the end of the load section toward the incline. It’s called the Mag-Drag.”
Jorgensen’s Mag-Drag conveyor is used for lighter flaky chips that tend to float. The conveyor has a magnet at the incline section of the conveyor that will pull the chips to the bottom of the casing, according to Kleppek.
“We also have an extreme duty conveyor; in some cases within the gear industry, the chips can be a really tough steel, similar to gun drilling,” he said. “We have a couple of applications where we have provided the extreme duty conveyor to handle difficult chips. With each of these conveyor types, we are experienced serving several OEMs, dealers, and end users across the gear industry.”
Emphasizing filtration
For many years, Jorgensen was considered by industry as mainly a supplier of conveyors, but Kleppek emphasized that filtration methods have been a large part of what Jorgensen has been doing for decades. It’s only recently that the company has rebranded itself in order to call attention to an important tool in the company’s toolbox.
“We’ve been providing filtration for 38 years, but we needed to further strengthen that service,” he said. “About four years ago, we changed our name. We are now Jorgensen Conveyor and Filtration Solutions simply to make sure that we’re promoting ourselves as a complete solution provider. We do a lot in the arena of filtration in a lot of gear applications. The filtration of the cutting fluid, which in most cases, is an oil-based cutting fluid, is something that’s very important to the system.”
‘One-stop shop’
Jorgensen’s filtration expertise, along with its conveyor technology, has allowed the company to become a one-stop shop, according to Kleppek.
“We are able to provide what I’ll call the coolant circuit, which is the filtration of the coolant as well the chip removal,” he said. “We have a fun little saying, that our overall goal is to provide a solution that either the OEM or the end user can ‘set it and forget it.’ We want our systems to be invisible/forgotten/ignored by the end user. With Jorgensen conveyor and filtration systems, maintenance is reduced to where chip removal isn’t even a thought. Because if you’re machining gears, you want your spindles to be turning. When your spindles are turning, you’re making money. Our goal is really to make our customers’ lives easy. It’s just like the oil system in your car, right? You forget about it until the oil light comes on.”
Kleppek said much of Jorgensen’s product line has evolved over the years to address customer challenges and to advance production methods in more innovative ways.
“My best example would be a product that we showed at IMTS called PermaClean,” he said. “It had a series of different cutting-edge developments in our industry.
The process starts with a conveyor called an EcoFilter that has filtering boxes built into the conveyor body. The EcoFilter-80 filters down to 80 microns at 97 percent efficiency, according to Kleppek.
“Essentially, we’re doing a major amount of filtering through the conveyor itself before any of that coolant can escape into the coolant tanks,” he said. “After the EcoFilter, only some of the finer particulate makes its way into what we would call the semi-clean part of the tank. Then we move that coolant using a transfer pump. In the unit shown at IMTS 2022, we used a hydrocyclone, but we have a couple of different filtering options down to 5 microns.”
This process can be used for any application such as gear hobbing or other types of cutting or grinding where very low filtering is needed, according to Kleppek. The coolant travels to a clean tank that has pumps on it that move the coolant back into the machine where the process repeats.
“We also featured a product at IMTS 2022 called Will-Fill, and it’s basically what I’ll call a coolant health unit,” he said. “It measures the coolant concentration, conductivity, pH, temperature, and more.”
Many times, if coolants are water-based or oil-based, water might be added for a perfect concentration level, according to Kleppek. This unit measures the concentration level, as well as the height level in the tank and combines new coolant and water to assure that mix is always at the optimal level.
“That entire system was what I’ll call completely automated,” he said. “As I said earlier, ‘you’re setting it and forgetting it.’ The last thing you want is any kind of manual intervention where you have customers walking around with a can full of oil or coolant filling the tanks. We’re trying to put the effort back on the machining process and eliminate the need to worry about things like that. If enough of these fine particulates migrate into your tank, you might have to stop and clean it out, and at $250-plus an hour for machining, you certainly don’t want to have that down for three or four hours.”
Meeting customer challenges
Having so many options available has gone a long way in making sure each customer’s challenges are met, according to Kleppek.
“I think we’re really good at it,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of competitors that offer a high volume of more basic products, for only very standard applications. I think we’re really good at having customers come to us for complete solutions to solve their problems. We have probably the widest breadth of conveyor offerings in the industry, including a fully integrated solutions, or standalone filtration solutions. As you can imagine, a heavy steel gear application might have big, heavy chips where something on the grinding side might be totally different. Sitting down with our customers and determining exactly what’s important to them is how we usually tackle our applications. We ask questions to determine how can we help. From there, we rationalize the right solution before we even start talking about our products.”
Product offerings such as the PermaClean give Jorgensen the ability to offer its customers fully automated coolant solutions, according to Kleppek.
“It’s really emphasizing keeping your coolant free of particulate and chips that are generated from the machining process, while also adding the element of coolant health and allowing a system that just functions,” he said. “If I could go back to my comparison, it’s like the oil or muffler in your car. You don’t want to think about it. You want to confidently ‘set it and forget it’ knowing you have the right coolant mix and an efficient system. Every time you stop the cutting process you’re losing money. If you have a fully automated system, the ROI can pay for itself almost immediately.”
More than 73 years in operation
Jorgensen has been operating since it was first started by Charles Jorgensen in 1950. At that time, the company provided trolley conveyors used for material handling and the moving of parts. As the company became more established in Wisconsin, local machine tool builders approached Jorgensen for hinged steel belt conveyors for machining and factory automation.
By the late 1950s, Jorgensen was offering chip conveyors for the machining and stamping press industries.
For the past 38 years, Jorgensen has also provided innovative filtration solutions. This became such an integral part of its catalog, that the company decided to add that process to its name.
Looking to the future
As Kleppek and his team look to the future, he said that automation will continue to be a key factor for machine shops everywhere. In addition, he emphasized that Jorgensen also is looking at even more ways to become that “one-stop shop” for its customers.
“As we look at that one-stop shop, it doesn’t end when the chips come out of the machine,” he said. “All those chips have to be managed, and so we sell solutions that help customers do just that.”
Coolant oils can be expensive, so re-using that oil as much as possible can really help when it comes to a company’s bottom line, according to Kleppek. That’s where Jorgensen’s chip wringers come in.
“One of the big things we sell are called wringers or centrifuges. They spin chips at a high speed to separate residual coolant from chips,” he said. “They are reclaiming oil. Especially in the gear industry and with gear machining, there’s a lot of oil used. Those cutting oils are very expensive. Your ability to reclaim, filter, and reuse that oil is very important. There’s significant ROI in that kind of an element as well. We also sell compactors and shredders. Some of the larger pearls and things that are generated in the gear industry can be basically consolidated by either shredding it or bricking it or both. In some cases, you have local recyclers that are willing to pay more for that waste product because it’s already bricked, and it’s smaller and easier to handle and move.”
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