Argon Industries checks all of those boxes. Established in 2002 with four employees and three fabricating machines, the company, located on Milwaukee’s northwest side, has invested substantially in production and automation technology to counter the dearth of skilled labor and succeed as a one-stop job shop.
Clement, after 17 yr. in his father’s small manufacturing business, got the itch to run and grow his own fabricating business. Within months of his new shop’s founding, Clement struck a deal to acquire the assets of Metals USA’s fabricating division. That buy alone grew Argon Industries to 25 employees and, including production that came along with the purchase, fab-shop equipment including laser cutting machines and press brakes. In 2013, Argon moved into its current 128,000-sq.-ft. facility on 14 acres, allowing the company to consolidate its two operations under one roof. That same year, Argon made a significant investment in inhouse powder coating.
“Powder coating enabled us to become a one-stop shop—from raw material to assembled product,” Clement explains.Huge Capex Investment
Beginning in 2018, Clement and the company invested $8.5 million to bring in a trove of state-of-the-art fabrication equipment and related automation, as well as quality technology and software. The haul includes turret punch presses and laser cutting machines equipped with load/unload automation, robotic-welding equipment, a panel-bending machine, press brakes with robotic tending, fastener-insertion automation and, to be running by year’s end, a fully automated robotic bending cell.
The technology infusion has allowed Argon, with its 130 employees across two shifts, to hold its own as a contract manufacturer of light- to medium-gauge sheet metal components and assemblies. Industries served include medical, food service, high-end appliances, infrastructure repair and maintenance, defense, HVAC and OEM equipment. Argon certifications include ISO9000:2015 and AWS D1.1 and D1.3, and its powder coating operation is UL-, GM9540-, and IEEE Std C57.12.28 and C57.12.29-certified. The company also maintains certification to manufacture 3R enclosures.
“All of these investments facilitated double-digit growth,” Clement explains, noting that all of the company’s core fabricating machinery now includes automatic material feed. “From 2020 through 2024, we have doubled our sales and have been able to retain our core group of employees and cross-train them on all of these machines, courtesy of a formal inhouse training program. And, our investments in automation have a huge impact on safety. Our employees experience less fatigue and physical strain due to the automated material-handling equipment.
“This new technology,” he adds, “also has allowed us to expand our customer-service capabilities. We perform more design-for-manufacturing (DfM) projects with our customers and are involved in value analysis/value engineering (VAVE) initiatives for new designs with customers, using our equipment capabilities to be more innovative and creative in problem-solving.”
Turret-Press Upgrade Delivers
The capex push included a major investment in Murata Machinery USA and its Muratec-brand turret punch presses and related automation for punching, forming and extruding. The first on Argon Industries’ shop floor: a Muratec Motorum M3058TG-S 33.3-ton servo-electric turret punch press, purchased in 2018. The machine employs large turrets to improve on-demand tool availability, as well as indexable multi-tools. By integrating bending, forming, tapping and other traditional post processes, it enables Argon to maximize productivity while minimizing setup and programming time, according to shares Clement. The turret punch press now includes a Muratec FS3015 automatic loader/unloader, added in 2021.
In 2019, Argon Industries added another servo-electric turret punch press, a Motorum M2558TS-S 27.5-ton model with an automatic loader/unloader. Also featuring large turrets, it added punching capacity to the Argon Industries shop floor and increased throughput.
Rounding out the servo-electric-turret-press roster at Argon Industries is a 33.3-ton Motorum M3058TG-S unit with another FS3015 automatic loader/unloader with eight-shelf sheet storage, installed in 2022 and enabling lights-out operation.
“We once had three standalone turret presses with no automation,” Clement says. “We needed one person per shift hoisting a sheet off of a skid and onto the worktable and then cutting parts off of the sheet all day. The monotony and fatigue was unhealthy. Now, instead of one person per machine per shift, the three machines together only require 1.5 operators per shift. Setup and loading/unloading are entirely automatic.”
Besides freeing employees for other more rewarding and valuable tasks and reducing risks of injury, the new turret presses and their automation enable 11-sec. cycle times for sheet load/unload, a significant improvement that boosts utilization and throughput, according to Clement. He also offers that the rigid and reliable servo-electric machines have proven more energy-efficient without maintenance issues surrounding hydraulics.
The three presses run all manner of jobs, from high-volume low-mix to low-volume high-mix. To boost productivity, Argon Industries schedules jobs using similar tools on each machine when possible, so a standard tooling set can run multiple jobs without tool changes.
“Typically, the parts we produce on the turrets include a lot of features—extrusions, forms, perforations, etc.,” Clement says. “These new machines and their automation provide twice the throughput as compared to our three previous standalone machines. And, if one turret press goes down, we readily can transfer work to another. This redundancy is important and goes a long way toward on-time delivery. We have the capacity to punch ahead and place parts waiting for forming onto shelves. As our customers release products, we can form and paint the parts, then assemble and ship them out. We don’t need a pile of parts ready to go, but just sitting there. This provides us with flexibility.”
Another plus: the new machines enable even stronger DfM capability within Argon Industries, according to Clement, citing the common occurrences of VAVEs with customers and lunch-and-learns with customer engineering teams to better ascertain Argon Industries’ capabilities.
One example of DfM tied to the turret punch presses: conversion of enclosure panels that previously required welding of screens on open sheet metal rectangles.
“We converted the customer to a design that included cluster punching to produce air openings on a solid sheet instead of using a secondary welding process,” Clement explains. “Other examples include redesigning assembly parts with slots and tabs produced on the turret presses instead of other fastening methods to improve fitup.”
One other big plus tied to the turret-press lineup: gentle handling of sheets and parts from loading through processing and unloading, important for panels and parts on products such as food-service equipment that must maintain smooth, blemish-free surfaces. To help ensure quality control, Argon Industries houses a camera-scanning inspection machine near the newest turret punch press. An operator simply pulls a newly processed part from the workcell and the camera system, via a part-specific program, issues a pass/fail notification.
“We don’t lose productivity that way, as the turret press keeps running,” Clement says. “At most we lose one sheet that had the failed part, and we quickly can remedy the problem.” MF
View Glossary of Metalforming Terms
See also: Muratec Murata Machinery USA, Inc.
Technologies: CNC Punching, Cutting, Pressroom Automation
