NIMCO Corporation, a manufacturer of gable-top form, fill and seal machinery for the cardboard carton industry, recently opened a new 40,000-foot manufacturing facility in Crystal Lake, Illinois.

As business increased, NiMCO kept pace with the challenge of competing on a worldwide basis by increasing both its productivity and efficiency. The new facility not only doubled NiMCO's manufacturing space, it also provided major advantages in production capacity, efficiencies and order lead times. Next, NiMCO decided to improve the productivity of the machinery it used to manufacture its products.

 NiMCO used a number of manual vertical knee mills in its manufacturing process. The company felt that increasing the productivity of this department without adding extra shifts or new machines could be accomplished by retrofitting CNC controls to the existing machines.

So the management set out to explore the various retrofit CNC packages offered on the market. After researching the various retrofit CNC packages available, NiMCO found the newest CNC offering from Sony Precision Technology America, Inc. (Lake Forest, California).

NiMCO looked at this turnkey system because it offered numerous advantages not found on other systems. These included brushless AC servos, digital drive amplifiers and electrical noise immunity built into the electrical cabinet. The system also came standard with a bright, easy-to-read 10-inch color LCD display, a built-in floppy disk drive and a 2-Gigabyte hard drive.

The Pentium 133 MHz processor, along with a dual processor for controlling the servos, and the Windows 95 operating system meant that the system provided advanced hardware and software. The Sony equipment had very high rapid rates.

The conversational graphics programming format appeared to provide the easiest such programming system with the most canned machining cycles. The trig assist feature, in fact, made it possible to program parts from prints missing critical dimensions without performing timely manual calculations.

As a result of its investigation, NiMCO purchased a two-axis Sony Millstation CNC from its local distributor, the Carl Staehle Company, and had it installed right on the factory floor.

"In just a half hour after the installation and training we were cutting parts on our new Sony Millstation," says machinist John Reynolds. "The Sony Millstation has reduced the time it takes to manufacture parts by at least 60 percent, and many of the parts are now manufactured in less than 75 percent of the time it took to make them manually," he adds.

As a result of this increase in productivity on its first installation, NiMCO now has installed a second Sony Millstation. This time NiMCO purchased the three-axis version that it expects will automate the process even further.


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