October •  November 2002 • Vol. XXI No. 1 • An Arnold Publication

A Small Company Thinks Big
How One Small Job Shop Is Building a Niche Machining Large Components

by C. H. Bush, editor; photos by John Semonish, staff photographer

Ordinarily, if you wanted to cut precision parts requiring a machining travel envelope of 242”X x 115” Y x 25” Z, you would not go looking for a small job shop with 6 or 7 employees. Instead, you probably would scan the yellow pages for a company with big facilities and sales sufficient to afford the kind of equipment needed for such work.

“We’re trying to break that stereotype view,” says Dan Woods, president and founder of Newbury Park, CA’s Dangar Engineering, Inc. “We’re a small shop with 10 employees working in a 10,000 sq ft facility, but we’re equipped to machine and inspect large parts. We have a 5-axis, Giddings & Lewis bridge mill with a part envelope of 242" X, 115" Y and 72" Z axis. We also operate a DEA Epsilon 3307 CMM with an inspection travel envelope of 161.75" X, 54.0" Y, and 53.375" Z. Our CAD/CAM software is Catia version 4.2.2 running on an IBM RS 6000 platform, so basically we’re geared up to produce very complex large parts out of virtually any kind of material for the architectural, automotive and aerospace industries.”

How did such a small company end up with such “big” capabilities?”
“When we first started in 1989 we didn’t have this kind of equipment,” recalls Woods. “We had the normal kinds of used job shop equipment and we were taking in any kind of business that would come through the door. But, after a while we started designing and machining master molds for a major automotive account and they kept wanting bigger and bigger models. So, I deliberately decided to gear up to handle big parts at very competitive prices. To do that we had to have big machining and inspection equipment.”

Refurbished Bridge Mill

For Woods “gearing up for big parts” meant buying and rebuilding a used Giddings & Lewis bridge mill and a used, large-capacity CMM.

“When we started out we couldn’t afford to buy that kind of equipment new,” Woods says, “but what we needed was capability, not newness. For our modeling work, we could have bought a different, less expensive machine, but I wanted to be able to machine everything from foam to titanium. So, I bought the Giddings & Lewis platform, then spent a year and $200,000 refurbishing the machine to make it better than new. Right now it has a 5-axis articulating head mounted on a Setco 50-horsepower spindle. It has a new CNC controller and we’re able to meet tolerances of .002” over a 20-ft part length. For the kind of work we want to do that’s very satisfactory. Certainly our customers think so.”

To add inspection capability to go with his bridge mill, Woods found a used DEA Epsilon model 3307 CMM.

“The DEA we bought is older and not as fast as some of the newer models,” he says, “but for our kind of work, accuracy, not speed, is important. This machine has a 40,000-pound slab of granite for stability, which delivers accuracy from the ground up without writing too many thermal expansion comps in the controller. This machine passes certification every time without problem.”

Taking The Catia Plunge

One major move Woods made when he first started Dangar was to invest heavily in Catia CAD/CAM software.

“Back in 1989, when I first started, almost all the big aerospace and automotive companies were using Catia CAD/CAM,” he says. “In those days Catia was just starting to be available for desktop PCs and at the time the other CAD/CAM systems were still in the fledgling state. Now, of course, they’re excellent, but back then, if you wanted a big company to talk to you, you had to knock on their door and say, ‘Hey, I have Catia!’ Then they would listen to you. That’s because they were running Catia on mainframe computers. I figured that if I wanted them to give me business, I needed to talk their language. I paid $150,000 to get into Catia, which was very difficult when I started, but basically it paid off.”

When he purchased Catia Woods already had extensive experience using it to machine large parts.

“I had worked in aerospace and in the oil industry programming machining equipment and CMMs,” he says. “I also did a tour at BeechCraft where I worked with Catia on a mainframe computer. So, when I bought Catia, it turned out that I was one of only a few people in our area who knew the software. As a result, Catia asked me to demonstrate the software for interested companies in the area. I didn’t get paid directly for the demos, but I did get a lot of new business as a result of the people I met during the demonstrations.”

One of the companies Woods demonstrated to was a Boeing subcontractor making insulation blankets.

“These people needed some complex molds made for the blankets,” Woods recalls, “and Boeing had asked them to buy Catia. When I went to them to demo the software, a light suddenly came on in their head. They said, ‘Hey, Dan, instead of us investing all that money in the software and all the time we need to learn it, why don’t you just make the molds for us?’ Of course I jumped at the chance and that contract lasted almost two years. That was really my first big break and things have been going very well ever since.”

Markets For Big Capabilities

Now that Woods has placed his company in the niche of being a small job shop with “big” capabilities for machining a wide variety of plastics and metals, who cares?

“It’s really pretty amazing,” he says. “Over the years we’ve done work for the automotive, aerospace, architectural, marine and commercial industries. We never know where our business will come from, really.”
In addition to the big bridge mill, Dangar operates a Roku Vertimac-B24-ATC vertical milling machine and several other pieces of support equipment.

“We use the smaller machines to produce smaller parts, of course,” he says, “but most of our sales come from work done on the bridge mill. About 50% of our sales comes from designing and producing master models for our customers. We have a lot of expertise in designing and producing tools for people making parts out of composites.”

Dangar is heavily involved in designing tools and working with composite materials.

“I do a trade show every year called Sampe, which stands for Society For Advancement of Materials Process Engineering. I've been doing it since 1991. We’ve built a really good reputation in this industry.”

Master Models

In the composite tooling field, Dangar gets a wide variety of customers ranging from automotive through international architects.
“A customer comes to me and says, ‘I want to make this part out of composite.’ So, then I design a tool that will make a composite blade, or whatever, for them. They use our tools to mass produce their products. Sometimes companies producing parts overseas come to me for their tooling. They have cheap labor offshore, but they don’t have the know-how to design and build the tooling. One area I see for expansion for us is in the international markets.”

Dangar has produced full-scale car models for Volvo and other models for Lockheed, Boeing. He has produced tooling used to manufacture light-weight propellers for the Helios, a giant solar-powered aircraft.

“People come to us because they know we understand the problems of thermal expansion when it comes to designing tools used in composite part manufacture,” he says. “We know what temperature can do to the dimensions on a tool and we design our tooling to compensate. We spend a lot of time with customers getting to understand their manufacturing environment. If anything, this experience, along with our big equipment, sets us apart. I think that’s why the slow down in the economy hasn’t hurt us as badly as it has some other small shops.”

And The Future?

“Well, in one way we’re no different from other job shops,” Woods says, smiling. “We want to get more production work to go with our prototypes. We have plenty of room here to add more equipment and we have the capacity for large-part production. I guess you could say we’re thinking “big” when it comes to sales, too.”
 

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