It all started with a very difficult part owner Bud Adams brought into the shop at AM&E (Adams Mfg and Engineering), a precision machine shop based in the Phoenix Metropolis. Not only did Scott Livingston, Manufacturing/Engineering Manager, believe Bud brought in a part that couldn’t be made economically and consistently well, but the whole team agreed with Scott.
Today, Scott is a believer. Not just in what AM&E can do for customers, but a believer in what the Okuma horizontal can do. Scott’s quote, displayed above, was what he sent to Arizona CNC, the distributor of Okuma machines in Arizona.
Scott came to AM&E 8 years ago. He was experienced in the Okumas, but he says, “The shop I worked in before AM&E had very old Okumas. I operated them, but I wasn’t doing any programming. I just pushed buttons and loaded parts. However, the most impressive thing to me was that these machines, purchased in the 1980’s, were still supported by Okuma. They ran really well, but when we needed a part replaced, we always got it from Okuma. I thought that was great.”
Soon after Scott came to AM&E, he became involved in the programming of machines. The company had a number of Vertical CNC machines, and was preparing to make their first Horizontal machine purchase.
“We purchased a low end horizontal machine”, Scott said. It worked and we used it for about a year, but it wasn’t rigid enough for the parts we were beginning to build, and it definitely wasn’t fast enough. Within 18 months, after evaluating a number of high-end horizontal machines, we selected the Okuma. In my opinion, it is 10 times better than any of the other higher end machines we evaluated.” (AM&E sold its lower end machine at the time it purchased its first horizontal Okuma, and has not since purchased a low-end machine.)
Scott says, “The Okuma sits on 3 points (e.g. legs) versus 6 points of some of their competitors, and this results in more rigidity in the parts we make.”
Additionally, Scott feels that an Okuma advantage is that they manufacture every component of their machine, including the controls. “It is such an advantage to be able to call one company when the machine goes down, and their is no finger pointing”, Scott said.
“The Okuma is also really very efficient with chip control, and chips go into the chip bin”, Scott said. “Our previous machine allowed chips to go into the coolant tanks, and we spent hours, with machine downtime, cleaning chips out of parts of the machine where they shouldn’t be. That doesn’t happen anymore”, he continued.
Today AM&E owns 3 Okuma horizontals.
Could AM&E build these parts without the Okumas? Scott answered, “Sure, but there would be such a large amount of scrap and bad parts -- it wouldn’t be economical to build them if we didn’t have the machines we have today”. The Okuma machine, with a Renishaw spindle probe installed, inspects the parts before the machinist even does. Afterwards, AM&E inspects the parts on their Brown & Sharp CMM.
 The part pictured is the actual part AM&E is building for a Japanese company, the one Scott and team believed they couldn’t build efficiently and profitably. Bud Adams says, “It is the tightest true position part we’ve ever tried to hold”.
AM&E is scheduled to achieve their AS9100 certification in January of 2010. They received the purchase order to build the part, the team says, because they were in the process of certification. “This award win was provisionally approved based upon our upcoming AS9100 certification”, Bud said.
For more information on AM&E, call them at 602-486-2019 or go to adam-mfg.com. For more information on the Okuma machines and Arizona CNC, call 480-615-6353 or go to their website at azcnc.com.