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Asher Sharoni is the president of B.A.R. Engineering & Manufacturing, Inc., a 30,000 square-foot aerospace machine shop in Cerritos, Calif., that he bought with his wife, Tova, in 2005, from the previous owners, who started the operation in 1985. “We liked the name, so we kept it,” he says. Since that time, this fast-growing shop has won a Boeing Certified Preferred Supplier Award, as well as received excellent ratings on the Boeing Commercial Airline Group’s ISBA, become AS9100 and ISO9001:2000 certified and is certified to produce nuclear grade products. The shop is also working to initiate a Six Sigma program with Boeing. The shop sells to numerous tier suppliers of Boeing and other aircraft builders, as well as the military sector, in their highly competitive Southern California market area.

Among its products are numerous hydraulic manifolds, profiles, structures and turned parts to 120 inches in length, made from various alloys of steel including 300M and 9000S, plus aluminum, titanium, platinum and magnesium, Inconel and more.

Despite all these successes, Sharoni notes, “We knew we had our limitations and we needed to differentiate ourselves from the pack.” The result of his investigation, along with that of his 27 design, manufacturing and operations personnel, was to step into the five-axis machine tool world. “In these economic times, we knew we were taking a risk to make that investment, but we carefully researched the available options, and decided this was the best move for our shop,” he says.

The process involved seeking out the suppliers of five-axis milling machines. Sharoni found that most of them were highly priced, used for large structures, required a large footprint, and excess height beyond his shop’s physical limits. He then discovered the DMU50 from DMG America, and its local technical center in Los Angeles. “Most of our milled parts are smaller and shorter runs, in the range of 10-15 inches high and 24 inches long. We were doing everything on three- and four axis machines, mostly Haas and Fadal. They were good and we did quite well with them, but we knew we were missing out on many jobs,” Sharoni says. In the DMU50, this shop found a smaller footprint, affordable price, less power consumption and more user-friendly control than expected, Sharoni said. “All our operators were accustomed to the basic control and they thought the CNC on this machine, a Siemens SINUMERIK 840D, would be too complicated, but they found the exact opposite was true. The control is powerful yet very user-friendly. We were able to train our operators for both our day and night shifts in a short time, which really surprised us, since our operators had never run a Siemens control before.”

He described one job in particular, a hydraulic manifold previously made on a four-axis machine. The initial question was whether to make the part as a casting or a forging, but the quantities were too low and made both of those routes cost-prohibitive. The block of aluminum needed to be machined in a very complex set of convolutions, each requiring a separate set-up, owing to the number of internal holes on compound angles. In fact, 23 set-ups were needed to make the part, which resulted in a slow cycle and considerable scrap. Since each hole required a special set-up, there were 11 set-ups just for the internal holes. Furthermore, foundation plates and custom blocks were needed to run this part, so the cycle was further slowed. It was a very precarious, tedious, and time-consuming job, Sharoni recalls.