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.






