June 2014 | ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com 39
Dart Machinery (Troy, MI) is a world leader in manufac-
turing engine blocks for racing and high performance
enthusiasts, as well as replacement blocks for a variety
of Detroit V-8 engines. Dart uses the SV-20
advanced flexible honing system from Sun-
nen Products Co. (St. Louis) to “master the
peaks and valleys” in honing cylinder bores
to produce custom results with near-mass
production efficiency.
“Advanced honing provides a key differen-
tiator for maintaining a competitive advantage
and achieving greater efficiencies and flexibility
in processing an ever-changing mix of blocks,”
said Dick Maskin, Dart founder and president.
“A new SV-20 honing system from Sunnen
enables high-precision, highly-flexible honing
of a wide range of block designs and metallur-
gies in a single continuous process without the
need for stone change,” Mastin said. Ameri-
can-made in St. Louis, the SV-20 replaces a
more expensive, European-built honing system that “just wasn’t
a good fit for our production, not flexible enough,” he said.
Maskin started Dart in 1981 in a two-car garage in Oak
Park, a Detroit suburb, and has grown it into the leader in
manufacturing racing and high-performance engine blocks,
heads and other components. The company does its part to
keep Detroit “Motor City” with both a technology center and
manufacturing facility located in the metro area. Today, 95
Dart employees make about 8000 blocks and 16,000 heads a
year for drag racing, circle track racing, road racing, and high-
performance custom cars, as well as marine and industrial
power applications.
The manufacturing facility operates three shifts, six or seven
days a week depending on production volume, with 26 large
Makino CNC machining centers churning out blocks, heads
and manifolds. Customers can choose between seven different
base block designs covering big block and small block sizes, all
evolved from NHRA pro stock V-8 experience. “That’s where all
the technology comes from,” said Maskin, whose own engine
creations achieved drag-racing’s first 300 mph quarter-mile run
and four-second Funny Car elapsed time.
“We produce custom in volume,” said Maskin. Blocks
are manufactured to customer order in type and material,
bore spacing, cam location, bolt pattern, deck height, lifter
location, oil pan bolt pattern, metric or US dimensions—“just
infinite variation and specialization.” Dart makes blocks in
various grades of iron (cast iron to CGI) and in aluminum with
Advanced Honing Masters Engine’s Peaks and Valleys
Dart Machinery technician Bob Dimitrijevich installs iron sleeves in a cast
aluminum block while a billet aluminum racing block awaits installation. Alu-
minum block bores are honed for size and geometry before liner installation.
ShopSolutionsCase Histories of Manufacturing Problem Solving
Once you understand the finish you need from honing—and we know these numbers now thanks to profilometers—you can make the bad blocks good, too.
iron-sleeved cylinder bores, including blocks machined from
forged and heat-treated aluminum billets.
Dart combines two advanced technologies—diamond hon-
ing abrasives driven with a programmable spindle, followed
by profilometers to measure the peaks and valleys of cylin-
der surface finishes—to replicate “best” block finishes and
ring seal. “Experienced racers have always had their favorite
blocks, ones that ran better than others,” said Maskin.
“We’ve learned through experience that it wasn’t the
block that made the difference, but how your honing process
worked for that exact block, since similar blocks might pro-
duce much less horsepower. Once you understand the finish
you need from honing—and we know these numbers now
thanks to profilometers—you can make the bad blocks good,
too. We use honing to achieve the ideal Rvk [valley depth
average], Rpk [peak height average], Rk [core roughness
depth], and crosshatch to finish a block for a given applica-
tion,” Maskin said.
Knowing the desired result, the honing process can be
tweaked to achieve the result in any block. “If you go from a
200 brinnel block of cast iron to a much tougher CGI [com-
pacted graphite iron] block, you need to know how to achieve
your finish numbers in the different
materials,” said Maskin. “Finishes also
must account for the type of fuel burned
in the engine, which could be alcohol or
natural gas.”
“Honing is all about sealing the
rings to the cylinder wall,” said Maskin.
“The key is valley depth. Too deep and
you have too much oil in it, slowing the
engine down with friction. Too little val-
ley, and the rings can hydroplane across
the valleys and you lose seal. Then, you
have to run thicker oil. Unless oil can re-
side in the valleys, it sits on the cylinder
wall and must be thick not to be torn
off by the rings. We think valleys need
to be in the mid to high 30 microinches
(0.000030"/0.00076 mm) to really seal
a race engine strongly, and deeper in
the mid to high 40s [microinches] for a
more conventional engine.
“For some blocks using today’s
steel rings, we hone for peaks of 12–15
microinches (0.000012–15"/0.00030–
0.00038 mm) or smoother. When we
turn the short block over manually
with a wrench, the rings will knock the
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Shop Solutions
40 ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | June 2014
A Chevrolet performance small block is being honed at
Dart Machinery in the new SV-20 flexible honing system
from Sunnen.
See us at Booth #W-1452
peaks down to 5 [microinches] or less before we ever start the
engine, but the valleys remain. We may not always take the
peaks off during honing. If you ball-hone or sandpaper, think-
ing you’ll accomplish this, you’ll simply reduce valley depth
and the engine won’t run as good. In our experience, if you go
smoother on honing peaks and valleys, the finish won’t last as
long. Starting with a rougher finish, the block is going to wear
in and be sealed up so tight it will surprise you,” Maskin said.
The SV-20 honing system gives Dart the flexibility to
efficiently process any engine block in any material and hard-
ness. “There is no typical production run for us,” said Maskin.
“We can put a new block on the SV-20, once the program
is written, and no machine can make a cylinder rounder or
straighter. The finish is all based on programming. If you know
where you want to go, you can get there,” Maskin said.
“Computer control has taken much of the black art out of
honing. Machines like the SV-20 produce a finish and size
that previously required a very talented machinist. If you have
to hone different blocks with different material content, like we
do, the newer equipment is significantly better,” Maskin said.
The Sunnen SV-20 honing system uses programmable control
to replicate “best” engine parameters and produce expert
results with minimal operator expertise. ME
For more information from Sunnen Products Co., go to
www.sunnen.com, or phone 800-325-3670
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Shop Solutions
42 ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | June 2014
Sunnen’s two-stage diamond abrasive honing tool does
roughing and finishing with 220- and 500-grit abrasives
without pause for stone change, making a wide range
of finishing options available to Dart Machinery.
Grinding Optics On CNC Machining Centers
During the past decade, Optimax (Ontario, NY) has expe-
rienced exceptional growth due to
the tremendous demand for specialized
optics and lenses that it manufactures for
a wide range of applications including:
aerospace, defense and medical devices,
lithography, and biomedical. As a result,
the company’s staff has expanded from
approximately 100 to 200 people, shifts
have risen from two to three (five days
a week), and manufacturing technology
equipment has grown from ten to approx-
imately fifty pieces of CNC machinery.
Three, four, and five-axis machining
centers are used for grinding, polishing
and shaping the lenses with diamond
tooling. Even though there is five times
more equipment operating over three
shifts (a nearly 10x increase in spindle
hours), the manpower required to write
programs for and operate this advanced
CNC equipment has barely doubled. Be-
ing able to output ten times the work with
only double the manpower translates into
roughly a five-fold increase in manufac-
turing productivity. Of course, the actual
productivity increase is significantly
greater than that because four- and five-
axis equipment allows many of the more
complex operations to be performed at
high speeds with a single setup.
Al Gould, mechanical engineer for
Optimax, said his company’s ever-
improving manufacturing agility and
productivity has occurred in tandem
with the rapidly expanding feature set
of its chosen CAM software, Mastercam
from CNC Software (Tolland, CT). The
company has three seats of Master-
cam with a maintenance license that
entitles it to free annual upgrades.
Working closely with its reseller, Optipro
Systems, the company routinely implements new toolpaths
and features that will enhance programming productivity
and reduce machine cycles. Eight staff members at Opti-
max use Mastercam day in and day out. Another eight are
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June 2014 | ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com 43
gaining proficiency and can step in as needed to support the
primary programmers.
Many of the R&D initiatives that have taken place at Opti-
max play a pivotal role in the direction and magnitude of the
company’s growth. “R&D activities at Optimax are primarily
SBIR projects funded by the Navy, Air Force, and NASA. All
of these agencies have a need for optics that can’t be made
currently. So we submit proposals to develop a process for
making these unusual optics,” said Gould. “The other job we
have in R&D is to take what we learned in those projects and
apply it to what we do on the shop floor. We try to take things
that are related to our work here at Optimax—whether it
involves extremely hard materials or extremely difficult geom-
etries—and apply it to our own manufacturing. Things that we
are doing now in the SBIR projects that are pie-in-the-sky, we
will be making commercially in five years.”
Recent R&D programs have focused on asymmetric lenses,
which are even more geometrically complex optics. These
completely free form optics are in development for both com-
mercial and defense applications. Asymmetric lenses can be
used as windows that correct distortions present in other optical
devices that are focused through them. The shape of an asym-
metric lens for a particular application is defined by a unique
equation that is translated into a Mastercam program governing
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Shop Solutions
44 ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | June 2014
Optimax uses Mastercam CAM software to program
machining centers to grind sophisticated custom lenses
using diamond-cutting tools.
See us at Booth #E-5616
the precise grinding of the shape into a glass substrate using a
five-axis machining center.
A goal of recent asymmetric lens projects has been to meet
form tolerances of approximately one micron over an area
of approximately 250 mm2. Manufacturing them involves a
meticulous process that begins by fine grinding lenses on the
machining center. Intense polishing then imparts additional
dimensional properties and surface finish. After measuring
the lens, a final polishing step corrects
any deviation from spec found during
measurement. Gould explained that there
is no room for error in this process, since
a blank of the material that you can hold
in the palms of two hands can cost up to
$5000. Even more disconcerting, it may
be the only one in existence and it could
take up to six months to “grow” another
one in a vacuum chamber.
When Optimax completes an R&D
project it generally delivers a part along
with documentation of a complete
manufacturing process using its existing
manufacturing and metrology equipment.
R&D projects are completely integrated
with all of the other manufacturing work
that is taking place at Optimax. Fast turn-
arounds of R&D projects is a function of
on-going general improvements in the
company’s manufacturing capabilities.
Gould said that Mastercam has pro-
vided a number of advancements that
have significantly improved the through-
put of both its conventional and R&D
optics manufacturing. For example,
integration with solid models is easily
accomplished. Some projects come in
as marked up drawings via PDF. Most
typical geometries for objects can be
defined with four terms: thickness,
diameter, and radius. “We just drop
them into Mastercam and away we go,”
Gould said.
Machine configurations for all of
CNC equipment, regardless of type, are
available from within the Mastercam
programming environment. So there
are times where operations for milling,
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Shop Solutions
46 ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | June 2014
See us at Booth #W-1446
“Creating a program to make a new lens is really quick.
You pick the machine, you pick the toolpath, and you set a
few parameters using menus. The longest part is waiting for
the CAM program to generate the toolpath, if there’s a lot of
complex geometry or for it to generate
the posts. One of the nice features of
Mastercam is that it is multi-threaded,
so while those things are going on in
the background, you can be working on
another part,” said Gould.
Toolpath selection is critical in using
diamond tools to grind super precise
shapes that require minimal polish-
ing. One of the most frequently used is
Mastercam’s multi-axis Flowline toolpath
for both roughing and finishing. This
selection keeps the tool always moving
in the same direction, which is critical
to creating precise surfaces. Using this
toolpath, it may take 4 to 16 hours to
grind a precision lens. While this seems a
long time, this process actually eliminates
many more hours that would be required
for subsequent polishing. These preci-
sion machining capabilities have reduced
polishing requirements by about 50%.
Programmers continually use
Mastercam’s Backplot and Simulation
modes to assure that toolpaths have no interferences and that
material removal is correct. This prevents damage to expen-
sive materials that may be irreplaceable.
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June 2014 | ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com 47
Continued on page 88
Optipro lenses are inspected after
polishing. Mastercam advanced
high precision toolpaths have
helped reduce subsequent polishing
requirements by about 50%.
The five-axis machine is one of the most heavily scheduled
pieces of equipment in the building because of it exceptional
productivity. Optimax also has another CNC machining center
that was designed especially for 3+2 machining. Multiple 3D
machining operations for 3+2 machining can be programmed
rapidly by quickly selecting tool orientations using Master-
cam’s WCS (Work Coordinate System).
Optimax is eager for its CAM partner to pursue lines of
development that are particularly advantageous for manu-
facturing lenses on standard production equipment. Gould
is impressed by how closely Mastercam listens to requests
for additional functionality. There have been a number of
times when he and others at the company have met with
reseller Optipro Systems to review desired features impact-
ing optical manufacturing precision and productivity. In
time, unique features much like those described appear
in subsequent versions of the software. While Optimax is
developing advanced optics that will be mainstream in five
years, Mastercam is at work developing CAM software tools
that will allow them to be manufactured more efficiently. ME
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Shop Solutions
88 ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | June 2014
Continued from page 47
Aspheric optics have one or more surfaces that have a
non-linear radius of curvature, but they have at least one
axis along which they are symmetrical. One aspheric
lens can take the place of three lenses in conventional
applications in aerospace, defense, medical devices,
lithography, and biomedical industries.
For more information from Mastercam/CNC Software Inc.,
go to www.mastercam.com, or phone 860-875-5006.
Team Effort Automates High Tech Job Shop
Investing in factory automation for the first time is a big deci-
sion for many CNC machine shops. For Loveridge Machine
(Salt Lake City, UT), owner Dennis Loveridge thoroughly
researched his options before making a decision for his high
tech job shop. Loveridge clearly defined what the company
wanted to achieve in automating a key work cell, shared this
information with six different machine tool suppliers, and
carefully evaluated the results with son and general manager
David Loveridge and his staff. In the end, Loveridge Machine
chose to work with Okuma distributor Hartwig Inc. (St. Louis).
According to Hartwig sales engineer Scott Clinger, “This
was truly a team effort that included Okuma, Gosiger Auto-
mation, Renishaw Inc. and Caron Engineering—all working
closely with Loveridge Machine to create the most effective
automated solution. The result is a system that the customer
tells us reduces their labor costs for these parts by 50%”
Loveridge Machine has been a successful, family-owned
high-tech CNC machine shop since 1975, making complex
prototypes and medium size production runs for such diverse
industries as aerospace, automotive, defense, oil fields, and
roller coasters. The company even had a role in the Hubble
telescope and the space shuttles.
Since 2000, the company has produced 30,000 parts per
year for an illumination flare used by the US military. Dave
Loveridge said: “Each year, the tolerances, cost and delivery re-
quirements for these parts become more challenging, especially
because machining these items is very labor intensive. Each part
has a short cycle time so the machine operators aren’t able to
do other work in between cycles. This adds up to a lot of wasted
time. We decided we needed to look into automating this process
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June 2014 | ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com 89
so we could reduce labor costs for each part, and free our people
to work on other tasks. We chose Hartwig because their proposal
satisfied all of our demands and they convinced us that the
Okuma CNC lathe was the best solution for our application.”
Hartwig’s Scott Clinger recommended the Okuma LB-
3000EX-MYW CNC machine tool as the best choice for per-
forming the various machining operations necessary to meet
Loveridge’s accuracy and part volume requirements. “How-
ever, this situation demanded a lot more
than a great machine tool, so I con-
tacted our factory automation partner,
Gosiger Automation in Dayton, Ohio.
After I explained the customer’s require-
ments to Mark Eddy and his team, they
designed a comprehensive solution that
incorporated robotics, inspection and
material handling.”
“One of the critical issues with this
application is that the part starts as an
aluminum impact forging and the OD to
ID is not perfectly concentric. This made
automating loading and unloading of
parts more difficult. Another factor we
wanted to address is how to automate
part inspection and any necessary tool
offsets,” said Loveridge.
Meeting these demands required
Gosiger Automation to integrate a num-
ber of components with the Okuma lathe.
The first challenge, according to Mark
Eddy, was enabling the Fanuc M-10iA/10
six-axis industrial robot to properly locate
and grip the forgings despite the lack
of OD/ID concentricity. “The aluminum
impact forgings are manually loaded
onto a powered conveyor queue standing
on end, hollow end up. The conveyor
has fixed side rails to maintain the part
positioning. At the robot end of the con-
veyor, a nest captures the leading part in
a nesting position for robotic handling.
Each of the continuous belt conveyors
has a capacity of 30 parts,” said Eddy.
“After pick up, the forging is evaluated
using Fanuc iR-Vision to determine the
offset of the part bore from the robot-
gripped O.D. This eliminates the effects
of I.D. to O.D. part run out when loading
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Shop Solutions
90 ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | June 2014
vision feedback, then offsets the part for loading either the main or sub-spindle of the
machine tool. O.D. to I.D. run out of the aluminum impacts is a maximum of 0.085" [2
mm] and mandrel load clearance is 0.030" [0.76 mm] at maximum material condition.
“The robot is equipped with a single, pneumatic two-jaw gripper with inter-
changeable chuck jaws specifically designed for these parts. The parts are gripped
by their outside diameters for loading onto the sub-spindle OP10 arbor and for
removal from the machine tool’s main spindle chuck. The robot system interfaces
with the Okuma lathe using Ethernet I/P,” said Eddy.
To meet Loveridge’s part inspection requirements, Hartwig and Gosiger Automa-
tion chose the Renishaw Equator for its versatility, precision and reliability. The gage
uses an SP25 scanning probe to take thousands of data points, much like a coor-
dinate measuring machine (CMM). However, while most CMMs are designed for
off-floor operation, the Equator was built for use in the manufacturing environment.
However, Loveridge was looking for more than part inspection, they also wanted
to use this data for statistical process control (SPC). The answer was to take the
data from the Renishaw Equator and process it through Caron Engineering’s
AutoComp software. Ryan Hegman, national sales manager for Caron Engineering
said: “After every fourth
part is machined, the
Fanuc robot places the
part into the Renishaw
Equator for scanning.
The data are then
sent to the AutoComp
software, which pro-
cesses the information
and compares it to the
master. If the software
determines that an
offset (in 10 thousandths of an inch increments) is necessary to maintain accurate
machining, it works through the Okuma OSP control to make the correction. All of
this happens automatically, with no operator intervention necessary.”
Automating a manufacturing process to meet specific customer wishes means
pulling together a variety of resources and integrating them as seamlessly as pos-
sible. “Gosiger Automation, Renishaw and Caron all worked with us to meet the cus-
tomer’s expectations. In addition, the people of Loveridge Machine were supportive
and cooperative every step of the way, which is critical to this kind of installation. We
all worked together to give them the results they were looking for: reduced cost-per-
part, better use of their manpower and a system that keeps pumping out quality
parts,” said Hartwig’s Scott Clinger. ME
For more information from Gosiger Automation, go to www.gosiger.com, or
phone 877-288-1538; from Hartwig Inc. go to www.hartwiginc.com or phone 314-
426-5300; from Okuma America Corp., go to www.okuma.com, or phone 704-588-
7000; from Renishaw Inc., go to www.renishaw.com, or phone 847-286-9953; from
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Smart option for in-house black oxide on iron and steel components. Nothing like it. Safe, simple, 30 minute TRU TEMP® process operates at 200oF and contains no pollutants. Non-dimensional � nish is RoHS and Mil spec compliant.
Ideal choice for Job Shops or OEM manufacturers whose customers need quick delivery of high quality � nished components at low cost.
Comprehensive Factory training and on going tech support to keep you � nishing in the black. Call us today: 952-937-7931.
TRU TEMP® 30 minute process.
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#6505 Birchwood Technologies ad MFG Eng one third r1.indd 15/7/14 1:21 PM
June 2014 | ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com 91
Okuma’s LB-3000EX-MYW CNC lathe is at the heart of
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