A customer came to us in September with a project that had been giving them troubles. LOTS of troubles. Our customer’s foreign supplier was having a hard time holding a critical bore diameter at +/-.0003” tolerance on a steel pulley. The bad bore sizes were causing bearing failures and immense problems in the field. This part is a 7” diameter pulley with (5) V-grooves. The pulley is a tensioner pulley and spins at an astonishing 1500 RPM when in use so any problems with bore size, roundness, and runout would be amplified with every revolution.
The first part of our project highlighted our QC lab and our ability to sort, document, serialize, and present the data to our customer. We are always happy to use our decades of inspection experience to help our customers solve their problems. After completing our CMM inspection (validated by dial-bore gaging), we were able to sort and serialize the foreign suppliers’ parts to determine their efficacy based on our customer requirements.
However, since we have such a great relationship with this customer, we mutually decided to go back to a blank sheet of paper and re-envision a new design for this part. After several months of design discussions and pricing options presented, the steel pulley was replaced with a new design: 100% 6061-T6 aluminum, machined complete and weight-balanced to ensure long part life. The final operation is to hardcoat anodize the parts to ensure wear-resistance and corrosion-resistance on the critical pulley surfaces, with the bores masked to ensure perfect bore size. The net result is a more light-weight, higher quality part with a comparable cost to our customer.
Not only did we solve our customer’s ongoing problem, but we took some work from overseas and brought it back to Wisconsin. Let Bothe be your machining and manufacturing solution!
