Page 78 - MetalForming October 2017

Plasma-Cutting Upgrade
With its new plasma cutter, Midwestern can mark parts to various depths, with some marks designed to disappear after painting and others to provide legibility in the field.
styles. We have to go through the mid- dle of the tractor to properly place our attachments, making it critical to main- tain close relationships with OEMs, and to work directly with their engi- neers, and adopt closer tolerances and tighter fitup. So we need cutting and forming equipment that can meet those tighter tolerances.”
Where 20 years ago Midwestern per- formed about 95 percent of its manu- facturing inhouse, today, to meet tighter precision standards, inhouse work accounts for 70 to 75 percent with the rest shipped to suppliers with high- performance equipment. However, because plasma cutting is considered a core competency, Midwestern decid- ed to upgrade its own process capa- bilities.
In producing side-boom, pipe-
laying
attach-
ments,
with lift-
ing capac-
ities from
10,000 to
220,000 lb. for
tractors of all sizes,
Midwestern per-
forms most of the
steel cutting along
with fitup, welding, final assembly, painting and shipping inhouse. In the mid-2000s, Midwestern replaced an oxy-fuel cutting machine with a plas- ma-cutting system to gain cutting speed and cut quality. “That machine was a workhorse,” recalls Beffer, “but about two years ago we decided to look at a new model to produce even better
cut quality in order to make more pre- cise attachments for the newer tractor models. Also, we performed a lot of manual layouts on our parts before drilling, a time-consuming process. We sought to automate that process on the plasma-cutting table via etching.”
High-Quality Cuts Yield Improved Weld Fitup
Midwestern, working with its dis-
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76 MetalForming/October 2017
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