North American auto sales fuel German manufacturers

The thumb-sized steel part looks like a cap, some kind of covering to protect a sensitive part. It doesn’t look like a nozzle. Nozzles have holes, and you can’t see any daylight coming through this solid-looking chunk of metal.

“With the fuel-injector nozzles, you used to be able to see the holes. Now, you just have to take our word for it that they’re there,” says Marc Fahrion, head of sales and part of the family that owns Auch Prazisionsdrehteile, one of the hundreds of small machine shops in Southern Germany that’s experiencing a boom in orders.

Exacting fuel economy standards in Europe have led motor vehicle producers to develop extremely precise technologies – turbochargers that boost engine power so cars can use smaller engines, fuel injectors that spray the perfect amount of gasoline or diesel per combustion, and multi-speed transmissions that best mate engine output to vehicle performance.

But it’s not Europe that’s driving the sales for Auch and other precision parts makers surrounding Stuttgart. It’s North America.
 

Standards drive technology

European auto sales continue to struggle, but with the United States pursuing aggressive fuel economy standards – 54.5mpg by 2025 – American cars are getting more European. Many are adopting technologies that have been staples from producers in Germany, England, and France for decades. However, while finished turbochargers and transmissions for vehicles are generally built close to the U.S., Canadian, and Mexican plants producing the vehicles, Europe continues to make many of the small, precise components.

Dr. Bernd Walker, managing technical director of machine tool producer Index-Werke in Esslingen, says German companies that focus on precision parts are seeing big gains from U.S. fuel economy standards.

“The new generations of these parts are starting now, and our customers will have to increase production for the next two to three years,” Walker says. “China and the low-cost countries are not yet able to manufacture to these accuracies, so this is business that’s going to go to Europe and North America.”

The transition to North America won’t happen quickly. “The U.S. industry needs more cost effectiveness, more technology than it uses now for these smaller, high-tech engines. They need more-effective engines to improve fuel economy, but they don’t have a lot of experience making those.”
 

Multi-spindle speed and precision

At first glance, Rich Praezision in Riederich, Germany, could be mistaken for an old-fashioned job shop. Its conference room/employee cafeteria has an overhead projector sitting in the corner that still gets used occasionally for presentations (though PowerPoint is more common). In one section of the plant, employees finish parts with hand tools, not multi-spindle CNC turning / machining centers. Look the other direction, and rows of new Index machines rapidly convert bar stock into transmission parts.

Rich makes small, critical parts for the nine-speed transmission that Chrysler is using in its new 200 sedan. German transmission specialists ZF designed the system, and workers make the transmission either at ZF’s plant in Gray Court, S.C., or Chrysler’s Kokomo, Ind., plant that ZF helped retool. Chrysler product planners expect to use the nine-speed in dozens of car models during the next few years.

“For our high-volume orders, we need our multi-spindle machines, which can quickly produce many different size parts within a part family. Our volume orders for automatic transmission parts are in the millions of pieces range. We couldn’t do that if we were making tool changeovers for every different size of shape that we needed to cut,” Managing Director Wolfgang Rich explains.

Rich’s recent investments in multi-spindle machines have been paying off, helping the company win work for automotive parts that it exports to the United States. Rich states, “The last four months have been the best four in our company’s history, both in sales and profits.”

Fahrion says Auch also has had to invest heavily in new equipment to meet the demand. New multi-spindle machines and automation cut cycle times, allowing the company to boost output. Each piece the company produces undergoes multiple cutting steps. The fuel injector nozzles with too-small-to-see holes, for example, require six separate operations. The modern Index machines, Fahrion says, allows Auch to produce those every 14 seconds, a cycle time that he couldn’t approach with older technology.
 

Precision demands faultless quality

An American enjoying a scenic drive along the rural Reichenbacher Strasse, about an hour north of Switzerland, could be in for a surprise. It’s probably the only area in Southern Germany where you could be pulled over by a 1990s Chevrolet Caprice squad car from Ridley Park, Pa.

The owners of Rees Zerspanungstechnik in Wehingen collect large American cars, including two Caprices (the squad car and a former New York Fire Department car), a Ford Crowne Victoria that used to stop speeders as part of the Nevada Highway Patrol’s fleet, and a classic 1966 Ford Mustang convertible (a cool car that the company uses to lure the best apprentices in the region).

The unusual collection could be symbolic for how closely the manufacturer must police its own production lines.

“We produce parts for large diesel engines, commercial trucks. Those are big engines, so the parts are bigger, but they still need precisely arranged holes and cutouts,” says Thomas Rees, engineer and managing director of Rees Zerspanungstechnik. One drivetrain part, for example, has 180 points of measurement it must pass before it can be shipped to customers.

With both large trucks and small cars, the need for perfection is understandable. Modern fuel systems are running at much higher pressures than the ones of a year or two ago, and those pressures could lead to catastrophic failures if parts contain even minor flaws. Rees says his company is constantly inspecting the parts it makes and the tools it uses to make them.

Fahrion says, like Rees, Auch faces stringent inspection demands. With precision parts, most customers want 100% inspection, something that wouldn’t be possible without robotically automated review stations.

“When you get up to 5,000psi, 10,000psi, all of that pressure rests on this tiny part,” Fahrion explains. “That’s why we need this precision and automation. Any tiny flaw, or even just a scratch, and you’re done. You have to be perfect with these engines, and you have to be perfect over millions of parts.”
 

Difficult material demands

Higher engine pressures can do a lot of good things for car engines. Most important (as noted in the Summer issue of TMV in a story about Toyota engine technology) is that higher pressures lead to a more complete burn of fuel, improving miles per gallon. Higher pressures also generally mean smaller fuel lines because engines are pumping larger volumes of air and fuel into smaller spaces. Smaller fuel lines save weight, further improving mileage. The downside is that boosting pressure puts tremendous stress on small parts.

Advanced, temperature-resistant alloys can handle those pressures, even at the temperatures that exist inside high-performance engines, but they’re a pain to cut.

“Every change that (automakers) embrace forces us to change,” Fahrion states. “They shrink the fuel systems to get higher pressure, so we have to make smaller parts. They use different materials to cut weight and handle the pressures, and we have to figure out how to cut it.”

The companies that figure out how to adapt to the new demands are going to be successful. The ones that fail are going to be like dead deer on the side of the road, says Bettina Bernhard, managing director of ZWT Zisterer Werkzeugtechnik in Spaichingen. A maker of custom inserts for cutting tools, the company recently had an art display at its plant that featured antlers and deer leather, a reminder that even graceful, powerful, quick animals need to pay attention to their environments.

“The deer was not quick enough,” Bern­hard jokes, pointing to the art piece. Her company, she adds, won’t suffer a similar fate. ZWT’s inserts can cut tiny channels in the hardest alloys used in the auto industry. Bernhard says her automotive sales have gone up in step with the industry’s demand for higher precision.

“Most of our parts have 2µm to 3µm tolerances. The smaller the tolerances, the higher the costs, so even though our volumes are low, this is a good business for us,” Bernhard explains.
 

Coming to America

The boom in precision parts for North American vehicles isn’t only helping German job shops. Jeffrey Reinert, president and CEO of Index Corp. USA in Noblesville, Ind., says orders to his company’s office near Indianapolis show that businesses in the U.S. and Canada are also interested in the speed and repeatability that today’s multi-spindle machines can offer in small-part production.

“There used to be major tradeoffs. You couldn’t have high-speed production if you wanted complex shapes. Or, if you were producing complex parts, you could not produce them rapidly without a high scrap rate,” Reinert says.

Advances in CNC controls, part-production simulation software, 3D modeling, and machine tool systems are giving shops more confidence in their ability to produce complex parts quickly and flawlessly.

Much of that work is done in Europe now, but Reinert expects to see more parts produced in American shops very soon. Many German and French shops have the capacity today to send parts to North America and Asia because the European auto industry hasn’t yet recovered from the 2009 recession or the currency crises that hit several countries there. However, when auto sales start picking up, those shops may be busy simply keeping up with European demand.

“There’s a big opportunity here. Some companies are already starting to see it,” Reinert says. “Everyone else is going to be seeing demand for these parts picking up soon.”

Index Corp.
www.indextraub.com
IMTS 2014 booth #S-8136

About the author: Robert Schoenberger is the editor of TMV and can be reached at 330.523.5381 or rschoenberger@gie.net.