Page 33 - MetalForming February 2015

burg, TN. With its roots tracing back to the late 1960s, the firm experienced quick and healthy growth throughout the 1970s on a steady diet of work from a nearby Proctor & Gamble factory, cooking up the popular Pringles brand of potato crisps.
“They were our original big-time customer,” says Cupples, whose father James Cupples (in 1969) founded and still runs the company. When James moved the company in 1979 to its cur- rent location in Jackson, 11 employ- ees toiled in a 12,000-sq.-ft. factory. A steady diet of work manufacturing Pringle-processing and packaging equipment helped to fuel the firm’s appetite for fabricating and machining equipment, “allowing us to grow to a size where we could look at expanding into new markets,” says Cupples. Among those new markets were OEM manufacturers of lawn and garden equipment, tractors and other heavy equipment, as well as steelmaking and processing facilities.
Today, the Cupples J&J customer list numbers more than 300. Recounting the firm’s evolution, Cupples notes that “we got into laser cutting in 1997 and that really started us on a roll. We saw that laser was becoming a great tool for accomplishing specialty-product fab- ricating. The key trigger for us was when the technology developed to allow clean cutting of 3⁄8-in.-thick stain- less steel. Almost from the start, we had that laser-cutting machine run- ning 24/7, so we bought another one.”
And so it went, as the firm picked up a head of steam and kept gaining acceptance as a diversified metal fab- ricator. Highlighting its laser-cutting resume now are six 6000-W laser-cut- ting machines—three CO2 machines and three machines equipped with fiber resonators.
“Our plan of attack always has been to support our customers by investing in the fabricating equipment needed to outfit their production lines,” says Cupples. The company manufactures products such as food-processing and lawn-and- garden equipment, agricultural prod- ucts and steel-processing apparatus.
Cupples says that his waterjet-cutting machine is yet another example of having the right tool for the job—the “missing link.” An example of the type of work the machine takes on: these parts waterjet-cut from 5⁄8-in.-thick Type 304 stainless steel, “where edge quality from laser- or plasma-cutting would not be up to the company’s stan- dards,” says Jeff Cupples.
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The Missing Link
With plenty of capacity to fabricate steel and aluminum to 11⁄4 in. thick, as well as machine heavier gauge work, “we started (in 2011) to recognize a need for cutting heavier gauge alu- minum,” says Cupples. “While we could plasma-cut thicker plate, the edge- hardening resulting from the process, along with the accompanying heat- affected zone, made it difficult to fur- ther machine (edge-finish and drill and tap holes) the cut parts to meet cus- tomer requirements. And, even when laser cutting 11⁄4-in.steel on our 6-kW machines, the cut edges often were not quite up to our cosmetic standards.”
To fill that niche and once again “find the right tool for the job,” says Cupples, the firm invested in a dual- head waterjet-cutting machine (a Bystronic ByJet Smart).
“We had so many capabilities to offer at the time (before adding the waterjet machine),” Cupples recalls, “but some of the work running on the lasers and on the plasma machine were not running very efficiently. For exam- ple, for our steel-mill customers, we were plasma cutting 2- to 4-in.-thick steel, and the edge hardening made it difficult to finish-machine the parts— drill and tap holes and mill pockets. Waterjet became the missing link.”
Now, the firm sends nearly all of its work thicker than 11⁄4 in. to the ByJet Smart. Its 6-kW fiber-laser machines take on steel from 11 gauge to 1⁄4 in. thick. “Thinner than that and we often use our high-power CO2 laser-cutting machines, with com- pressed air,” Cupples notes. “We’re very good at compressed-air cutting. It’s a lost art, and allows us to, with our CO2 machines, match the production costs of a 4-kW fiber laser. We didn’t see the need to go with fiber until manufacturers came out with high- er-power (6 kW ) machines.”
‘Steeling’ Business
Since bringing the waterjet machine inhouse, about half of the work on its 5- by 10-ft. cutting table has been projects already being cut inhouse using other, “less efficient processes,” Cupples says, “that now run more productively on the waterjet.” For example, Cupples cites waterjet cutting of aluminum machine frames at twice the speed of machining on a bridge mill. And, for manufacturing machine side frames from 2-in. steel, the ByJet Smart carves the profiles in one step with finished edges, whereas machining the profiles required a two-step milling operation.
“In some cases the cost of waterjet cutting is the same as that for machining,