SPINDLE SPEEDER AN ‘EYE OPENER’ FOR FISHING LURE MAKER
By using BIG DAISHOWA’s RBX7 Air Power Spindle for its primary machining process, the operations decreased from 75 to 15 hours, which was transformational.
Fish aren’t as dumb as they look. They won’t just bite on any lure. The shapes, colors, sizes and sounds lures make have to be just right—and ultimately worth the fisherman’s money and trust. That’s where American Baitworks comes in. In addition to rods, apparel and tackle for fishermen, the Mississippi company distributes a family of well-recognized lure brands across the world. American Baitworks uses a soft-plastic injection molding process to create a large portion of its offering. Two large blanks of standardized 6061 aluminum are machined using a delicate .031" ball mill, each with one half of a flat mold. The two machined plates are then put together and the opposing cavities, typically somewhere between .375" and .625" deep, form the full mold where soft plastic is injected to achieve the near-complete bait. While this would be considered production work by many, there is nothing simple or all that repetitive about the machining leg of the process. With such tiny detail, hundreds of cavities in each mold, more than 20 million lines of G-code and spindle speeds limited to around 12,000 RPM and feed rates of 36 IPM, some single plates were taking up to 75 hours to complete. While reliable, the process had proven very time consuming. The team set out to find a way to increase speeds and feeds without sacrificing the precision and reliability needed. With a single machine tool on the floor, one of the best options appeared to be a spindle speeder. Once that was decided, the decision had to be narrowed down just a bit further: air- or coolant-driven speeder? “Everything in our facility is run off of air,” American Baitworks Warehouse Lead Manager, Ladd Flurry, said, “We have two 70-CFM compressors that keep up very well. I was leery of air- driven speeders. I didn’t want to take any CFMs away from the
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