Gearing up for deburring

Beard & Fitch has been in business for over 150 years, manufacturing transmission components for a wide range of applications from high performance cars to large industrial diesel engines. In their continuing quest to improve quality and efficiency through new technology, the company has introduced thermal deburring to remove the burrs from their double gears.

'Deburring gears has always been time consuming, but over our 150 year history we have obviously refined in-house systems to minimise the time taken and to improve the finish. However these double gears have impossible to reach burrs, and we're ending up chasing individual burrs between each tooth. Our frustrations increased no end and finally caused us to look elsewhere for help.' said Michael Jackson, the Production Manager.

'We came across thermal deburring by chance in an article in a trade magazine. You very rarely read articles on deburring issues so it caught my eye.'

After an initial phone conversation with the Deburring Centre in Poole, samples were sent. A week later the Deburring Centre rep returned the samples, announcing that deburring could take just 20 milli-seconds.

At least, that's the time that it takes the thermal blast to surround the burrs and oxidise them. The whole process takes a little longer as the platen needs to rotate under the chamber, a piston raises it sealing the chamber, then a mixture of natural gas and oxygen under pressure is injected, and finally ignited. Exhaust gases are then released and the platen cycles round to be unloaded.

Even so 'all' burrs - wherever they are situated - are removed in far less time than they could be with a mixture of hand tools.

'It was a delight to discover a quick, efficient process that saved us the time consuming job of brushing every individual tooth.' continued Mr Jackson 'The quality and consistency has been substantially improved. And despite the extra logistics of sub-contract, it has actually saved costs and given us a better product.'

Deburring team leader Ms Carol Cooper stated 'Problem jobs like the one tackled by the Deburring Centre impact on the efficiency of the section, by solving this problem we are able to concentrate on our regular work at a time when we are very busy.'

Thermal deburring although conceived in the States 40 years ago, has rarely hit the headlines. Most engineers and machinists have never heard of it in the UK and even those who have, usually have a wrong concept of it. The Deburring Centre Ltd in Poole, who have three of these machines, have pro-actively promoted thermal's ability and have invested heavily into educating the engineering community at large how to solve their deburring issues in a 'flash'.

http://www.deburr.co.uk

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