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February 2005

Keeping Know-How In-House
Quadruples Shop’s Sales

A tool and die shop decides to keep its products and abilities in-house, adds five people, and quadruples sales to approximately $16 million.

By using wire EDM for die components, Wiegel has been able to produce dies capable of regularly producing stampings to 0.0005" accuracy or better.

Wiegel Tool Works, Inc. (Wood Dale, IL) has a 63-year history of tool and die innovation and, recently, remarkable growth thanks to the decision to become it’s own customer and transforming itself into a precision stamping operation.

Today, Wiegel Tool’s presses (60 - 400T range) produce parts for the electronics, automotive, telecommunication, and mold insert industries. Its range of parts includes automotive window latches, internal switches for transmissions, and various types of electrical contacts, produced, primarily, from bare red metals and highly alloyed copper-based alloys, stainless steels, and little commercial steel. Also, most of the stamped metal products are pre-plated materials (tin, silver, gold, palladium, nickel, copper flash), in addition to many post-plated intricate terminals. For the majority of these parts, Wiegel to holds to 0.0005" accuracy or better. The company is both ISO/TS 16949:2002 certified.

“My father started this company in 1941 – the day before Pearl Harbor,” says Marty Wiegel, president. “After my father died, I came into the firm in 1968. Wiegel Tool Works was mostly a tool and die, design and build house.

“Around 1994, I decided to stop building tooling strictly for the outside. Previously we’d build and send our quality and know-how to other stamping companies. Since then, we’ve gone steadily upward, adding $1-2 million of new tooling into our press room each year,” advises Wiegel.

How far up have they gone? In 1994, with 50 employees, Wiegel Tool booked less than $4 million worth of business. Today, with 55 workers, it more than quadrupled its sales, with much of the growth has come in stamping orders from increasingly demanding customers.

Essential EDM
One of the keys to this growth, says Marty Wiegel, has been Mitsubishi EDM equipment.

Wiegel Tool uses the wire EDM primarily to cut the die components. “We’ll buy oversized blocks, by maybe an inch in every direction, except for thickness,” says Wiegel. “We’ll cut the die components first in vertical machining centers, and then use the EDM to cut the blocks to exact dimensions inside and outside. We’ll throw away $15 in steel, a fraction of the price they’d have to pay a machinist to do the costly sawing and sizing blocks for heat treat.”

Climate Control
Another reason for the firm’s success is a completely climate-controlled machining and EDM room, which was added in 1999.

“The ultimate customer is the press,” Wiegel explains. “We were finding minute variations in dimensions. You just can’t perfectly match stamping various die blocks done on different days, if one was cut with the ambient temperature at 70° and the other cut at 80° – you lose a tenth or so. With the tolerances our customers are demanding today, that’s unacceptable.”

Keeping his tool and die making talent in-house and becoming a precision stamping operation Marty Wiegel has grown the Illinois shop to about $16 million in annual sales.

“With the climate-controlled machining room, those variations are all in the past,” he continues. “We’re getting the accuracy we want now. We just did four plates for a 10-up tool, with just about zero clearance, really – it came out magnificently, the blocks went together perfectly. We used to outsource a fair amount of outside wire work – we really can’t farm much of anything out anymore, we need to control the quality.”

The climate-controlled machining room also helps with maintenance. “The Mitsubishi machines are in a controlled environment, they get regular maintenance, and as a result you get hospital-clean electronics – it’s fantastic,” Wiegel enthuses. “We really haven’t had any trouble with any of the Mitsubishis at all.”

He adds that the operators help in this area. Two operators together run all six EDM machines and a robot, keeping them operating on a 24-hour basis, seven days a week. The main operator, Wiegel confides, is “fanatical” about cleanliness. The robot is used primarily to change workpieces, removing dies and feeding new blocks into the machines, and facilitates the 24-hour operation.

An obsessive attention to accuracy is still another factor in Wiegel Tool’s rapid growth.

Not content with the Mitsubishi units’ built-in accuracy, Wiegel has each machine checked by laser every two years and recalibrated. The company also spends a great deal of time insuring that the relationship of EDM wire to work piece is “dead perfect square” – an area some outside wire firms overlook, Wiegel claims.

Quality Payoff
“Our company has a reputation for quality now, and it’s starting to be felt in our business. It’s all due to the way we’ve gone about insuring accuracy in our work. The Mitsubishi EDM machines have definitely helped us…especially the new FA units.”

Wiegel attributes the rest of his company’s recent success to plain hard work and attention to detail. “When a problem comes up, you might be able to fix it in production – but did you find the real root cause of the problem? You have to find that, or the problem is going to come up again and again. That’s what we’ve been doing for many years.”

Mitsubishi EDM
February 2005