91ÊÓƵÍøÕ¾ÎÛ

Testing a gage requires an operator to follow careful, standard procedures and use reference standards even more accurate than the gage in question. But what about manufacturing that gage?

The Athol, Massachusetts, headquarters and production facility of The L.S. Starrett Company answers this by pointing to its more than 500,000 square feet of manufacturing space. Much of it is filled with mills, lathes, Swiss-type machines and a wide host of other equipment, from inspection stations to an automated palletized Mazak cell. Just as important are the facility’s ongoing efforts to optimize its processes, leveraging lean manufacturing principles to improve its own operators’ factory floor experiences.

Athol Roots

Since its 1880 foundation in Athol, Massachussetts, Starrett has continually expanded its physical facilities alongside its product catalog. Its campus now includes several buildings on both sides of the downtown Millers River, as well as a hydroelectric dam that provides about a third of the complex’s electricity. Even after later expansions and acquisitions have led to Starrett facilities across the U.S. (as well as international manufacturing facilities in the U.K., Brazil and China), the company’s first site is still home to precision hand tool manufacturing. Tim Cucchi, the continuous improvement manager for the assembly department, says that of the company’s roughly 2,700 precision hand tools, around 88% of those are made start to finish in Athol.

The location employs about 450 people, with 250 working on the factory floor. Cucchi says tool makers go through a four-year apprenticeship in Athol, rotating between departments to learn processes and equipment while also brushing up on necessary math skills at nearby community colleges. This is in addition to “Starrett University,” a 40-hour crash course for new hires in the basics of manufacturing, shopfloor safety and company history.

The Machines Making Metrology Devices

This attention to training is vital due to the sheer variety of machines the facility uses — and the exacting tolerances of its parts.

According to Cucchi, 90% of parts at the Athol facility start on a Swiss-type screw machine. Many of these are still cam-driven, though the facility is gradually adopting newer CNC models. The factory’s production floor also makes good use of its Bridgeport machines, which Starrett has equipped with Accu-Rite DROs. These Bridgeport machines can be found on multiple floors of the Starrett facility, with the company using foot pads under each upper-floor machine to ensure stability and its own No. 199 Master Precision level to ensure everything is square to the floor.

The company also maintains a sizable grinding department with both surface grinding and centerless grinding machines for removing angles and dovetails, with the department also working to deburr parts. Other, more specialized machines are localized to production areas dedicated to producing specific metrology devices. These range from relatively common wire EDMs to punch cells, climb milling machines and others, including an ESSA press for radius gages that Cucchi heard decades ago might be one of the last two ESSA press machines in the world.

Many of these machines are manual or cam-driven, which Cucchi notes are less likely to spark interest in younger generations of prospective hires than more modern hardware. As such, the company has a three-year plan for introducing additional automation and updated machines into the factory. This plan has already resulted in a growing presence of robotic-assisted CNC throughout the factory, but Cucchi stresses that it is not a universal change. Although the company hopes to remove repetitive manual tasks in as many places as possible, Cucchi says that meeting the requirements necessary for Starrett’s finest-resolution gages (which can be accurate to within 50 millionths of an inch) still requires a high-skill human hand.

Tooling Optimization

This skill requirement is especially relevant to the Special Gage division, which is headed by Andrew Morin. This department creates custom gages for customers with difficult and unique requirements (including Starrett’s factory floor). Sometimes, the gages the department makes are the only way to obtain a particular measurement, and other times they provide a way to simplify collection of an otherwise difficult-to-obtain measurement.

This includes large calipers meant to measure parts as large as 16 feet in diameter, which Morin says are typically made from steel and require four people to operate. The Special Gage division made a carbon fiber version of the same caliper with a honeycomb construction that is far lighter and only requires two people to operate.

The division also recently tackled hot steel gaging (that is, measuring billet steel at temperatures between 1,200 and 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit), which traditionally requires operators to perform several time-consuming measurement tasks inside a hot oven. The Special Gage division’s newer electronic gage for hot steel gaging is much more efficient, Morin says, and much less dangerous for metrology personnel.

Morin says that some popular items produced by the department can shift to the main factory floor during periods of high demand, though this is uncommon. More common in recent years, however, has been shared engineering tips across teams, which Morin says reflects ongoing efforts to foster a more collaborative, more efficient factory environment at the Athol facility.

The Metrology Psychology

The Athol facility’s shifting culture is also visible across its factory floors. Cucchi and his team have been hard at work redesigning production cells for greater efficiency and a better operator experience. Everything from layout to furniture color choices has shifted in some areas, with Cucchi saying that the newer, blue and gray areas reflect research that blue enhances viewer mood.

Indicator families, which used to be built in separate parts of the facility based on size, are now created at the same cell, concentrating tools and skills in what Cucchi says is a move toward lean manufacturing. Each area also undergoes regular Kaizen events that standardize 5S principles across the shop and optimize the condensed cells. One cell for a back plunger indicator assembly area was condensed from three sub-assembly areas to a single cell, reducing the square footage necessary for its operation by half (and thereby freeing it up for other parts). The optimization also freed up two full-time employees, who Cucchi says were then able to contribute 900 hours assembling other indicators over the three months after the Kaizen event.

In a parallel to the facility’s understanding that Bridgeport machines still have a place in high-tolerance manufacturing, the company runs its Kaizen events through handwritten notes and whiteboards rather than dedicated software. Cucchi says the idea behind this strategy is that writing things down by hand will increase the feeling of responsibility teams have toward the findings and recommendations.

The facility also maintains an Obeya room, which is a sort of command center where management uses printouts and whiteboards to visually manage quality, production, throughput and other critical business components. Supervisors and department champions meet here multiple times each week to check on the state of the factory floor and promptly apply countermeasures to any issues. A dedicated team of engineers also meets in the “Starrett Solution Center” every day for two hours to discuss ways to improve quality, throughput and cost efficiency. In addition, Starrett charges a production planning team with planning which parts are needed in what quantities and how to manage machine capacity for optimal production. As part of this, the team tracks the full kit of parts that go into any one of Starrett’s many precision hand tools.

The focus on white boards and hand-written notes does not preclude the use of electronic dashboards in select areas, and supervisors across the factory floor host daily, face-to-face, department-specific meetings. Here, they review dashboard readouts on safety, quality and delivery, as well as any other concerns factory floor staff might have.

Internal Support

As mentioned about the Special Gage division and its symbiotic relationship with the main factory floor, Starrett’s individual departments are working more closely together to improve their processes.

This includes support departments such as a dedicated tool and die team that maintains punch and die sets for other departments, as well as an extensive tool room department. The toolroom department not only prepares tools but maintains them, sharpening milling cutters and reamers. It also manufactures the fixtures for gages and provides maintenance for capital equipment around the shop.

Starrett uses its own devices and technologies in the measurement and testing of several of its gages. This includes unique equipment from the Special Gage division as well as more widely offered precision gages and metrology equipment such as its automated force testing systems, multi-sensor vision systems and Starrett granite from its Tru-Stone division.

The facility also houses machines to perform many of the postprocessing steps that go into its metrology devices. A large tumbling department tumbles, blends and brightens workpieces to achieve deburring and finishing specifications a wide range of parts prior to plating and assembly. Heat treatment may mostly take place in nearby partner facilities, but tempering takes place in-house (and is one of the facility’s robotically automated operations). Laser marking, chrome plating and sandblasting also take place in house, unifying many production steps under one roof and eliminating possible transportation and communication bottlenecks with outside vendors.

This unification of processes represents a boon to the business as a whole and to the employees working there. Tedious, repetitive processes have been automated or otherwise streamlined, navigating work orders is simplified, continuous improvement efforts are more robust and the company’s high-end operations and high-skill employees still work in the ways that are most suitable for them. The resulting efficiency gains have freed up Starrett employees to spend additional time and effort on its recent entries to the market: a touchscreen-based digital/dial indicator, the W4900, and Starrett’s largest AVR benchtop vision system to date, the multi-sensor AVR400. Starrett’s team aims for these newer tools and metrology systems to improve on the efficiency of inspection personnel, thus granting them some of the same benefits Starrett itself now enjoys.