The challenge
An United States corporation with production sites worldwide produces brakes for electric motors. These brakes are used wherever quick and safe braking of electric motors is required. In forklifts, golf caddies, electric wheelchairs, and many other applications.
For its plants in France, Scotland and China, the group was looking for a competent partner to help reduce its overall procurement costs.
The special nature of the task
A key role within the complex brake housing is played by spacer sleeves, which determine the air gap between the brake housing and the cover. They are crucial for ensuring quality and need to meet the highest quality requirements.
The Dakoko solution
Providing the customer with the full package of the required turned and milled parts allows Dakoko to offer the best possible terms. An agreement on annual quantities and minimum production batches across all plants enables Dakoko to produce economical batch sizes, contributing significantly to cost reduction. All the more so given the relatively small individual order volumes for each plant.
To ensure quality, Dakoko manufactures the critical spacer sleeves on Japanese sliding headstock lathes, which enable high process stability. The parts also undergo automated 100 % final inspection before packaging to ensure that the zero-defect goal is achieved.
The components are stored by Dakoko at its own sites in Germany and China and delivered to the customer as needed, meaning the customer’s stock on hand can be reduced to a minimum.
Details that make the difference
The challenge in manufacturing brake housings lies in the surface treatment that follows turning and milling. Since the housings have numerous blind holes with small diameters from 2.2 mm, fluids cannot easily escape from the holes during electroplating of the components. This can result in the holes not being coated, the holes becoming severely rusted due to residual fluids, or streaks appearing on the surface as a result of the fluid leaking out after the drying process.
In the past, the holes were manually vacuumed or blown out after coating. This poses a high risk of faults, as a hole can easily be forgotten, resulting in the entire expensive component having to be scrapped. Moreover, manual processing is very expensive.
To solve the problem both more reliably and more cost-effectively, Dakoko developed an innovative, now patented rotating frame that enables optimal electroplating results with minimal manual intervention. This allows the process quality in this critical work step to be sustainably increased.
Benefits for the customer
- Consistently meeting quality requirements
- Optimal terms for plants worldwide
- Optimal logistics for all plants
- Reliable quality thanks to automated 100 % monitoring and patented process innovation by Dakoko in the area of coating