Automotive aluminum wheel manufacturer
Southern California
With the manufacturing of cast aluminum automobile wheels moving offshore due to pressure from large automotive companies to reduce costs, a southern California manufacturer of aluminum automobile wheels began looking for ways to differentiate themselves and eliminate price from their customers’ buying decision.
With this in mind, they decided that they would enter the high end luxury and sports car wheel markets because they were less interested in price and more interested quality and performance. To do this, they would need to produce wheels that were better balanced (i.e., concentric to the mounting surfaces) and light weight.
Current automotive standards require that the inboard tire mounting surface and the outboard tire mounting surfaces (bead surfaces) be concentric to the “pilot bore” and “hub face” within .150mm. To clearly set themselves apart, they set a target concentricity value of nearly half that. Kitagawa - Northtech determined that to accomplish this, we would need to design a product that would grip and locate the workpiece at its “datums” while freeing up the inboard and outboard bead surfaces to be cut in a single turning process. We designed a custom engineered solution that would grip and center the wheel at the pilot bore (datum A) and pull the wheel’s hub face (datum B) back against a hardened locator. The solution also contained a set of 8 hydraulically clamped “work supports” that made contact with the inner diameter of the wheel nearest the inboard bead surface. The 8 work supports provide dampening to reduce vibration and support the weakest section of the wheel from distortion caused by the cutting tool.
The final result was a solution that was capable of consistently creating concentricity of .050mm on wheels that were 20% thinner at the wall, all from a package that was 50% lighter than the workholding technology that was currently available.
The real benefits:
- They were able to differentiate themselves as a high end wheel manufacturer allowing them to enter a market formerly reserved for specialty wheel makers.
- Increase their selling price while their cost to produce the wheel stayed the same.
- Reduce wear and tear on their equipment due to the reduction in mass.
- Use less aluminum in the wheel casting process because the new solution could machine wheels with 20% thinner wall thicknesses.
