Successful businesses often start off at square one with humble beginnings. In the case of Ty Miles Inc., those origins were literally in the house of the company’s founder.
“Tyrus H. Miles was my grandfather, and he was born in 1911 and grew up in Detroit,” said Ty Miles Inc. President Steve Mueller. “Ty Miles was a broach engineer who worked for Colonial Broach in the late ’30s, and then for Michigan Broach in the ’40s where he was chief engineer. Then he moved to U.S. Broach in that same position before he transferred to their sales department and moved to the Chicago area. In 1958, he pulled some investors together to start Ty Miles Inc., and one of them was a man by the name of Leonard Smith whose family owned a screw machine shop. He was actually one of Ty’s original customers, and he ended up joining the company and serving as its president from 1972 until he handed the reins to me in 1998.”
Mueller’s grandfather originally started working out of his house, designing broaching machines and tooling and then sending them off to be manufactured elsewhere, according to Mueller.
“Eventually, he leased some space in 1963, just a couple doors down from where we’re located now, and that’s how the operation started,” he said.
Broaching and turnkey equipment
Since then, Ty Miles has built systems and turnkey equipment for gear companies, according to Mueller. That includes parts that are broached for the gear industry such as internal splines, keyways, external splines, rack tooth forms, other internal forms, and external flats on a shaft.
But what Ty Miles offers doesn’t stop with the gear industry. The company does a lot of broaching work for a myriad of other industries as well, according to Mueller. That includes transportation, aerospace, medical, firearms, hardware, and appliance.
“We’re a machine builder; that’s our primary focus,” he said. “We also do production broaching in-house, and we design and build broach-related tooling.”
Customer loyalty
No company can exist for more than 60 years and not be loyal and accommodating to its customers from the get-go, according to Mueller.
“Without customers, you don’t have a business, so you really have to take care of your customers, and I feel that, over the years, our service department has always been very good in those relationships that we develop with our customers, and oftentimes the service tech is on the front line with the customer,” he said. “Those relationships have helped us to get the next order from the customer.”
That testament is made even clearer by the work that has been performed by Ty Miles over the decades, according to Mueller.
“My grandfather started the business in 1958; we’re on year 66 here, so I think our longevity is something to be proud of,” he said. “I think the fact that we have multiple machine customers speaks volumes that our customers come back for that second, third, or fourth machine. In fact, we have one customer that has 16 machines.”
Working an order to completion
When a customer comes to Ty Miles with a job, it goes through a thorough process before it’s completed, according to Mueller. First, a drawing is requested, which goes to Ty Miles’ engineering team where it determines what stroke and force is needed. The team also determines how the part is going to be held.
“Obviously, some of the first questions we like to ask are: ‘How many pieces are you going to do? What’s the volume on this
part?’ Because a lot of times you might get excited for somebody’s new application and then you ask them how many parts and they go, ‘Oh, a hundred pieces,’” he said. “It’s hard to justify spending over a hundred thousand dollars for a turnkey system on a hundred pieces.”
In those cases, however, Ty Miles does offer an alternative solution, according to Mueller. If there’s an available tool, it’s possible for Ty Miles to broach the parts for the customer. The volume needed will, more often than not, determine the proper path to satisfy a client. Other factors might include: Will the process be automated? Is the customer going to provide an input-output conveyor, or will that be provided by Ty Miles?
“That’s typically how we handle a new inquiry,” he said.
Adapting standard equipment
As far as supplying machines, Mueller said Ty Miles has standard machines in its inventory.
“We build vertical, horizontal, and table-up systems,” he said. “Our table-up is unique. It’s a four-post design, but our vertical machines, for instance, have a basic footprint or machine, base ram column, etc. And sometimes, that gets custom-made if we need a wider table or we’re going to do two, three, four parts across, so we go with a wider column, things of that nature. But it all starts from a standard system.”
Another aspect of Ty Miles that makes it unique in the industry is the company’s standard off-the-shelf broach tooling, according to Mueller.
“We have tools that are 12-inch, 18-inch, and 24-inch, and then we offer them in different widths for either slotting tools, flat broaches, or straddle broaches,” he said.
Taking on automation
In addition to meeting its customers’ needs, Mueller said that automation has been a big factor in keeping pace with an ever-changing industry.
“Basically, a broaching machine goes up and down; tables go in and out, but I think it’s what you do to enhance that fundamental system,” he said. “We’ve done a lot of different things with automation, pick-and-place, robots. And that’s today. I think people want to do things as much as they can in one-part handling, and if the volume is there, they want to automate it. Sometimes our customers will buy the system from us, and then they will interface their own robot for part load-unload.”
A fringe benefit of increasing automation is how it has been able to pull a younger generation into the machine shop, according to Mueller.
“All you have to do is go to IMTS, and you see how fascinating the robots are and the capabilities, and I think, especially for probably the younger generation, that’s exciting,” he said. “We actually had a robot in our booth back in 1984 at IMTS.”
Innovative solutions
That innovation, Mueller said, has been one of Ty Miles’ strong suits over the years.
“I think we’ve been very innovative,” he said. “Another thing that we did over the years is sometimes we incorporate other secondary operations along with broaching, where we’ll have a broach station index over to a drill station or tap station or something else.”
For instance, Mueller emphasized Ty Miles has done a number of systems with unique properties.
“We did a system for a cylinder plug for a company,” he said. “We had 48 stations around the table: 24 tooled, 24 open. We had a vibratory bowl feeder system loading it. We had five rows of broach cutters, and then we indexed around and had three or four drilling stations. Complicated systems we create like that are something to be proud of.”
Eyeing the future
As Ty Miles looks to its next phase, Mueller said that checking equipment — along with everything else — is going to continue to get more sophisticated.
“I think our goal is to be a part of that and try to improve our product and produce good-quality parts off of our systems,” he said.
But it doesn’t end there. With decades of machines being made and integrated into the industry, another step for Ty Miles is rebuilding those older machines to make them compatible with an evolving sector, according to Mueller.
“We have so many systems out there, and we have systems from the 1960s that are still working, but there is the opportunity to rebuild them,” he said. “I would say over the last 20 years, probably, we’ve started to do as many rebuilds on machines as new machines, because the unique thing there is it’s a cost savings to our customer, especially if the volume’s not there. It’s an opportunity for them to get into broaching, even when you don’t have the cost of a new fabrication or deal with a supply chain issue. You have something to start with as far as rebuilding the system and then you take it to whatever level they need, whether it’s completely replacing electrics or how automated the system’s needs to be.”
