The workpieces that Trane machines at the Pueblo, Colorado plant are large. Boring diameters run to 17 inches and require keeping some of the tightest tolerances of any manufacturing operation performed by the company

The Trane Company, Pueblo, CO. , had been using 12 boring bars to make a series of bores when BIG Kaiser Precision Tooling engineers helped develop a boring bar with three different inserts, allowing Trane to reduce from 12 to 4 the number of tools required to complete the operation.

“Some high production jobs require boring several diameters on the same centerline, as the Trane job did,” says Jack Burley, BIG Kaiser Vice President, Engineering. “Using several different boring tools to machine such a part requires repeated tool changes. Using a special dedicated tool with KPT insert cartridges reduced the cycle time on the part by eliminating time-consuming tool changes.”

Insert Cartridges Do The Trick

Trane’s Manager of Manufacturing Engineering, Peter Guyon confirms that the use of BIG Kaiser’s adjustable shelf mount and fixed pocket insert cartridges reduced cycle time significantly on the Trane job. “We could use the same tool shanks and extensions, and the tooling maintained BIG Kaiser’s rigidity and stability,” says Guyon.

The BIG Kaiser insert cartridge features a patented system for adjustment in either direction (radially or axially) by up to .024”. It has a unique pivot pin which maintains line contact to the boring bar pocket at all times, through the entire range of travel—an essential ingredient of special boring bar stability.

The Trane/Pueblo engineers learned to appreciate the versatility of BIG Kaiser tools, as the plant’s growth brought new challenges. At one time they had sought a solution for an aging machine on which they had difficulty holding tolerance on circular milling of outside diameters.

“We turned the BIG Kaiser boring bar around and trepanned it. It worked beautifully. The tool times out long before we lose size,” Guyon says.

Manufacturing Partnership

Left: Trane’s manager of manufacturing engineering Peter Guyon poses with manufacturing engineer Keith Burton. These men have cut cycle times significantly on large boring operations by using BIG Kaiser Precision Boring Tools.

Trane’s Pueblo manufacturing facility and BIG Kaiser Precision Tooling, Inc., Elk Grove Village, IL, have had a partnership in manufacturing efficiency that dates almost to the plant’s opening in 1987.

As Trane manufacturing engineer Keith Burton remembers it, the plant opened in November 1987 with 3 NC machines. Greg Fegan, an engineer from Trane’s headquarters in La Crosse, WI, came to help organize our manufacturing operations and introduced BIG Kaiser Precision Tooling to Pueblo in the spring of 1988.

Trane’s corporate philosophy emphasizes quality, reliability, cost-efficiency, and on-time delivery. BIG Kaiser tooling has become an effective complement to the achievement of these goals, according to the Trane people.

Trane opened the Pueblo facility to manufacture a new generation of helical screw compressors for air conditioning. The Series R® CenTraVac® featured Trane’s latest advancement in compressor technology, a helical-rotor design, created to serve growing commercial markets. Today, Trane makes half the large chillers cooling commercial buildings in North America.

Products Require Large Diameter Bores

The workpieces that Trane machines at the Pueblo, Colorado Plant are large. Boring Tool diameters run to 17 inches and require keeping some of the tightest tolerances of any manufacturing operation performed by the company.

In the first year, Trane/Pueblo was making one helical screw compressor a week. Now it makes hundreds of compressors a week in two buildings. Each building is more than 200,000 square feet and shifts run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

“We don’t have time to redo anything,” says Guyon. “Everything we make was sold four months ago. So long as BIG Kaiser tools work the way they do, they’ll be here forever.”

Easy To Use Tool

Machine operators readily accepted BIG Kaiser tools because they were easy to set up and required little maintenance.

“Especially in the early days, we had many design changes,” reports Burton. “Putting together boring bars to cut any size or length was very easy,” he adds. “We got flexibility without having to have something special designed and built. Timeliness of delivery was good, especially on the standard items.”

From Plumbing To Air Condition

Trane started in La Crosse, WI, as a plumbing firm in 1885. Founder James Trane and his son, Reuben, incorporated The Trane Company in 1913 to produce a new type of low-pressure steam heating called Trane Vapor Heating. In 1931 Trane became a pioneer in an entirely new field, air conditioning. Growth was slow through the depression and World War II, but Trane was quick to take advantage of the postwar boom in construction, and sales have been strong ever since.

Initially, Trane’s product development laboratory concluded that manufacturing a screw compressor in large production quantities was not economically feasible, so tight were the machining tolerances required. In the 1980s, however, introduction of new computer technology and development of a new generation of tools made it possible to machine these products accurately and economically. The helical rotary compressors first built at Pueblo contained fewer moving parts and 15 percent better part load efficiency than the typical reciprocating compressor.

Trane has manufactured and shipped over 60,000 helical rotary compressors worldwide. Today, Trane’s next generation of air-cooled and water-cooled Series R® chillers continues its world class reliability rate of 99.5-99.7 percent in the first year of operation.