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This is an air brake compressor housing for an over-the-road truck manufacturing application, a four-position hydraulic fixture. A lot of the challenge that this part gave us was that we have to run 15 different part numbers on this fixture. And the configurations of these parts, as you can see by looking at the ends, that there are two different configurations on this particular fixture; the motor adaptor housing, depending on who he was selling the part to, be it Brand A truck or Brand B truck, they all had different motor face phalanges, so there was 15 different varieties of these. The opportunity for us came with working with this particular customer on the product design. We were fortunate enough to be able to work with the private designers and manipulated the locators and clamping points around on these parts, making them similar enough that we were able to get all 15 of these parts on this fixture with no change over. So there was no change over of clamping points or locating points required to run these different parts, so that was an opportunity to work with the product people, which comes along every once in a while, and if it does present itself to you, that's something that you need to take advantage of.

In this system, this is a manual hydraulic hose connection. You can see the two quick disconnects on the front of the machine. This is also what is called an Integral Pallet Tombstone. The pallet and the tombstone or the upright of the fixture are machined or created, molded and created together; there is no split line with the fixture sitting on top of the pallet. This allowed us to get parts much lower in the work zone. It also allowed us to reduce the tolerance stack up of the pieces, there are fewer joints on the fixture, therefore we were able to reduce the tolerance stack up across the different nests on the fixture. This also was used in an MMC/FMS system or real guided system. This had seven machines served by two remote work stations.