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MMS inMotion Multimedia Presentation - Innovative Fixturing

Real-World Case Study - Steering Gear Fixture - Transcript
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This fixture that you're looking at now is a steering gear fixture; it is a nodular iron steering gear housing, a rather large piece. This is an extremely high-volume application, one million parts plus per year. We're using an eight-position hydraulic fixture, expanding locators inside of those parts in order to achieve the location specified by the part print. The main valve bore has two sets of diameters that we need to locate on so we have to have three-point expanding locators inside of there. This was done with our Continuous Connection Hydraulic system. This is before the advent of CPH. No chip or coolant contamination was allowed to be on these fixtures so we had to design with the intent of chip evacuation and coolant evacuation, so there are a lot of sloped surfaces down inside that fixture to help guide the chips away from the locating surfaces and off the fixture into the chip bin on the machine. And then, there's no operator intervention allowed on these machines from the standpoint this was, this was in a union type environment; the operator could not twist or turn any handles, couldn't do anything other than load parts on there and push a button; the fixture had to do all the work for him. That was just part of the challenge that we faced on this particular fixture.


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