Multitasking Machines Scale Up Setup

“Everybody has a mindset that manufacturing is production,” notes Dustin Sanks, president and owner of Staunton, Illinois-based job shop Sanks Machining. “Well, what we do on repeat is not pulling parts out of the machine — it’s putting tools in the machine.” While production shops focus on reducing cycle times, for job shops like Sanks Machining, the emphasis is on reducing setup time. “We have to produce setups,” he adds. “We have to be mass production at setting up.”

Sanks is a proponent of using the latest technology to tackle this challenge, particularly multitasking machines. In fact, a disagreement with his father, the founder of Sanks Machining, over purchasing the shop’s first CNC lathe with milling functionality and Y-axis off-centerline capability led to Sanks purchasing the business himself.

New Machine, New Owner

Sanks’ father founded Sanks Machining in the 1990s. “He was working for somebody else and thought he could make a go of it,” Sanks says. “A manual lathe, manual mill, little drill press, welders. It was just him in the garage.” He started taking work from the local phone company on the side, and when he got a contract with a local steelyard, he threw himself into his own business full time. “In ’97 he bought an old Giddings and Lewis horizontal boring mill,” Sanks reminisces. “The reason that sticks out is because they built the building around it, and he moved the stuff from the garage into the end of that shop and quit his full-time job.”

Sanks Machining has always been a job shop. “Whatever the phone company needed to do an install, or the steel company needed fixed on a machine, anything that came through the door, that's what he took on,” Sanks says. This work sustained the shop through the 2000s and the addition of CNC technology.

For his part, Sanks graduated from Ranken Technical College, and spent most of the 2000s working for larger shops in the area. “There was no intention to be where we're at today,” he says. But when his job moved out of state in 2010, he returned to work for his father — but it wasn’t all smooth sailing. “We had our ups and downs and disagreements and battles,” he notes.

One notable dispute took place in 2013, when Sanks purchased the CNC lathe. He says his dad had “the old school mentality of, why do you need that? You don't need to spend that much money. You're taking on a bunch of debt.” But Sanks wanted to ensure the business wouldn’t become stagnant. So, he put his foot down and his father eventually agreed to sell him the business in 2015. “At 30 years old, I really didn't realize what I was getting myself into,” he says.

One and Done

The multitasking lathe was part of Sanks’ plan to reduce setup time. As an example, Sanks describes a typical part for the shop at that time. “Imagine a pin,” he says. “It’s got a turned diameter. It's got a head on it, and there's a grease hole in the side of it and a flat cut on it. And on the backside, there's a drilled and tapped grease hole.” Initially, the shop was turning these parts on a simple two-axis lathe, then moving them to a three-axis mill to cut the flat and drill the side hole. “We had to do an extra operation in a different machining center just to get them out the door,” he explains. Not only did this process make Sanks Machining’s existing work less efficient, but it also limited the shop’s ability to win new work. “People don't want to pay for that extra step or that extra setup,” he notes.

One-and-done setups are also easier on machine operators, especially important as skilled labor becomes harder to find. The machine simplified processes and made them more repeatable. “They can rely on the machine and the brain power put into the process on the front end rather than trying to repeat that same process time and time and time again,” Sanks explains.

Beyond reducing setups, the machine also increased precision and enabled the shop to take on more complex work it couldn’t have done before. Sanks describes one such part: “It's got holes around the periphery, and it's got a shape cut on the top of it. That was completed in our CNC lathe 100%. With that job, there's no way that we could have done that in a simple, two-axis lathe.” If not for the CNC lathe, the part would have required a lathe and a mill as well as a special fixture to hold the part in the mill, plus the extra setup time and potential to introduce quality issues. “All those things start to add up,” he says.

Conversational Programming

Prior to adding its first CNC lathe, the shop was programming its parts using longhand G code written at the machine with the help of canned cycles. Sanks explains that, at the time, the shop’s work wasn’t complex enough to justify a CAM program.

When Sanks purchased the company’s first CNC lathe, he visited the machine tool OEM’s U.S. headquarters for training, including both its G-code and conversational programming capabilities. “The first three days, I was so frustrated,” he remembers. “I was almost ready to come home because it didn't make any sense to me. Wednesday night, I finally dropped everything I knew and I dumbed it down. And then it hit me: you're overthinking this.” He realized that conversational programming just required answering questions. “That was the light bulb for me,” he says. “If you have machining basics, I feel confident that you could produce a program to start producing parts with machine control conversational programming.”

Sanks says the effect conversational programming had on the shop was drastic. It slashed programming time, and because the programming was already happening at the machine, this increased spindle uptime. He estimates it nearly doubled efficiency and reduced programming on standard parts from two hours to 15 minutes. Furthermore, it enabled less-experienced machinists who weren’t as familiar with longhand G code to program parts.

As the shop started to take on more complex jobs, it added offline programming of the most intricate features. He estimates that 60% of the shop’s parts can be fully programmed conversationally, while 40% require some offline programming.

Five-Axis Multitasking

More soon followed the CNC lathe, including the addition of a multitasking machine in late 2023 based on a good customer’s RFQ to produce inserted milling arbors. These are complex parts, with flutes and pockets for inserts. They’re also large — nearly six feet long and eight inches in diameter.

Sanks also saw the opportunity to move some of the shop’s existing jobs to a multitasking machine. For example, it had been producing crankshafts on a manual lathe and sending them out for grinding. “It was very, very time consuming, and it was very, very tribal knowledge,” he says. The multitasking machine simplified production of these parts, enabling more operators to work on them.

Sanks likes multitasking machines because it offers the ability to turn in addition to five-axis milling, which he says gives him an advantage. “We can utilize it as a normal lathe or normal mill, but when you have the opportunity to do all this in one machine, you set yourself apart, especially with the size of the machine that we invested in.” He describes a recent job for a company on the east coast, which involved producing two-inch-diameter eccentric shafts, the longest of which were 48 inches. The ends were turned down for bearings and keyways, and the 40-inch-long center body was turned all the way down with an oblong shape on it. Without multitasking machines, the shop would have had to move the parts back and forth between a mill and a lathe to complete them, while multitasking machines enabled the shop to machine them in one setup.

Sanks says the shop’s multitasking machine is currently backlogged with work, but a lot of those jobs involve “small intricate parts that require an angled hole or clocking around the outside from a feature that's done on the front.” He’s now in the process of adding a smaller multitasking machine with a second spindle to add capability and take some of the load off the larger multitasking machine while reserving it for jobs that require its larger work envelope.

Still Standardizing

Sanks’ push for standardization goes beyond machines and controls though. The shop has established a standard tool list for each type of machine tool. “It was an eye-opening experience to see how much time that saved, and the tooling costs dropped significantly,” he says. When quoting parts, his team would budget 20 minutes to find a tool, put it in the holder and set it. But if doing an extra pass with a tool that’s already in the machine takes an extra minute, that saves 19 minutes, he notes.

This mindset also applies to workholding. The shop’s milling machines have a standard subplate that works with a range of fixtures. When buying material for parts, the team considers how it’s going to mount to the subplate. Even if the shop uses a larger piece of material, that tradeoff is worth the time savings of not having to set up a tooling plate.

“That's the big thing for me right now, is changing the mindset internally to, let's use our brains and our technology, instead of shunning technology and just trying to get through the day,” Sanks says. This requires shop owners and management to look beyond day-to-day operations to see the bigger picture and then make investments in new technology. “We're not going to be here if we don't start adopting technology and making that big capital expense,” he emphasizes. “We prioritize the latest technology in our personal lives: the newest smartphone and watch, and technologically advanced cars and trucks that make our lives easier. But if a technology that has the power to drastically change our trajectory requires a mindset change and uncomfortable learning curve, human nature tends to revert back to comforting habits.”