Future of EDM in USA?

Hi Everyone.

Just thought I would ask a question and see what others have to say. I have operated a wire EDM job shop in the Buffalo NY area for the past 12 or so years. There have been some good times and some bad times. The question I keep asking myself is what does the future hold for EDM in the USA? When we started out, there were a lot of machine shops, stamping houses, mold shops and so on. Now a lot of them are gone and I'm thinking that more and more are going to be gone with this "Great Recession".

Where are the bright spots in EDM? Just thought I would ask the question to see what others are seeing.

Dial EDM,

As I work for a machine tool OEM, it has been truly upsetting to see what has happened to the machine trades in the USA over the past several years. The down-turn in the global economy has greatly influenced this, but a lot of work has left our shores due to pricing pressures with the now mature global competitive market. Some shops have flourished in the USA, and they have done so through diversification of their work (not all their eggs are in 1 basket), and several others have focused on key specialty "niche" areas. Many shops have also strengthened their “niche” areas by taking the initiative to develop some special techniques or processes, which has protected them from outside competitive pressures.

In terms of EDM, the market in the USA is rapidly changing. Requests for new EDM equipment have been very focused on production applications. By far, the Medical and Aerospace industries have been the most active. The traditional Die & Mold requests and interest are still there, but they have become the minority of sales over the past 5 years or so. As with any production based machining, the challenges here for EDM are to squeeze out every last second from the cycle time, and do whatever is possible to reduce manufacturing costs (wire consumption, maintenance, electrode wear, etc.).

Another emerging area is Micro-EDM and micro-machining in general. This is a huge potential growth market, but has been slow to mature. Much of the micro EDM work is rather simple details, but due to their size, the challenge becomes work holding, inspection, and attaining ultra high accuracies. The ultimate big challenge with this market is to make production micro machining more feasible and cost efficient by reducing both the machine tool costs and subsequent per piece part price. Currently, much of the micro work being done is either small scale or at an R&D level.

-Brian

Brian,

We too fall into that group of having a "niche" and that has really saved us. We design some tooling for one industry that most know nothing about. Wire EDM is a good way to make the tooling. So it has been working well for us. But I want to stay on top of the trends and not be an old goat.

I am not surprised by your comments, is the EDM market growing in the area of Medical and Aerospace, or is that just where sales are coming from? I guess what I'm saying is, are people "starting or expanding" their EDM operations in these markets or are they simply "upgrading their equipment"?

Being in the industry, do you think a "wire shop" with no other machining capabilities is something that can continue to survive?

Thank you for our honest opinions.

Dial EDM,

Over the past few years, many shops have tried to diversify into other industry markets (for survival), and Medical applications by far have shown the most growth. At Makino, we have seen sales from both customers that are dedicated almost 100% to medical; to people entering into the medical world for the 1st time with production based EDMing. The established medical manufacturers have been looking to upgrade and improve their EDM capabilities, while the newcomers are starting from scratch. In both cases, we have seen a high requirement from these customers for specialized engineering services and support.

The Aerospace Industry is another growth area for EDM, but these applications vary widely. We have also seen high requirements for Turn-Key services in this sector as well. The Aerospace Industry in general has been very SLOW to re-examine EDMing as a machining solution. There are VERY STRICT guidelines on how many parts are made and how they can use EDM, and these rules are 30+ years old. I'm sure I don't need to state all the advancements and improvements that have happened in ALL EDM systems over the past 30 years, so the Aero-Industry in general tends to treat EDMing as a Hammer and Anvil type process. We have seen a trend for many of the younger Aerospace Engineers be willing to examine the EDM process in detail as a solution to machining many of the newer alloy materials. At any rate, this entails a mountain of paperwork and lengthy certification process which examines the material metallurgical characteristics after EDMing...such as HAZ (Heat Affect Zone), Recast, and Micro-Cracking.

From my viewpoint, the Medical Industry is a lot easier to get into than the Aerospace Industry. The Aero-Industry is very strict on what manufacturing methods are used (process control), and they use many ISO and NAPCAP standards for everything. It would be almost impossible to open the doors to this industry without knowing how these control systems work, but once you are in and established, more doors will open.

As for my opinions to your comment about [Being in the industry, do you think a "wire shop" with no other machining capabilities is something that can continue to survive?], there is most certainly a future, but methods and requirements for future business will change. If you only offer Wire EDM capabilities, you will most definitely have to specialize in a particular “niche” area to survive. As long as you do good quality work and deliver on-time, I would almost bet that your customers would ask you to expand your machining capabilities and do other work…I have seen this many times! In looking at the Medical and Aero Industries, you do somewhat have to “Pay” to “Play”. Both these industry sectors require and mandate that your operations be ISO certified. Beyond this, there this also other equipment that might be necessary to do business in this area, such as secondary finishing and inspection equipment.

-Brian

Brain,

With Medical what do you see with machine requirements and quality requirements. Does someone HAVE to have a "Medical EDM" meaning a lot of EDM manufactures have started making machines which they call for "Medical". Though I'm not up on this, it seems that the filter systems are "upgraded".

Do medical jobs seem to require the use of "smaller" wire (0.006" or less). Or are a lot of applications able to use 0.010" wire?

Could you describe what you might mean by specialized engineering and support?

From what I have seen most Medical EDM tend to have a lot of machines (read more than 5). I'm sure there are places with 1 or 2 machines. Our business is on the "small side" it's the way we plan on keeping it. Currently 3 wires, 1 semi cnc hole popper, CMM, 1.5 employees and some other support equipment. Are you seeing small shops being able to get into this type of work?

Currently we are upgrading some gaging requirements for one of our customers with better controls and documention I'm just thinking that I might want to understand the next step in this area.

In the past, our view on expanding our machining capabilities has been that we did not want to "compete" against our customers for some of the same jobs. Ofcourse this was our "job shop" view and in the early days of our business it made finding new customers simple. Since they knew we are not going to be able to go after the work. Their choice was generally send wire work to their competitor who would screw them at some point or send the wire work to us. I guess we could use this same approach with Medical or Aerospace but I'm not sure how successful that will be.

Dial EDM,

You have lots of questions, and I will do my best to answer them:

The Medical industries parts seem to be gradually getting higher in accuracy and surface finish requirements. Many of the so called "Special" Medical Wire EDM's available now are more marketing BS than actual substance. Many of these "Medical" machines are stripped-down standard version machines that are sold at a lower cost. I would check out the other OEM's websites and make your own determination to what the differences are, but be sure to compare against a standard level machine.

From my perspective, I have not seen a mass increase is the use of small wire for medical parts. The big thing in Medical EDMing is the increase in mass level production, which continues to favor 0.010" and 0.012" wire for the pure SPEED advantage. Most medical EDMing still only requires 1 or 2 Pass machining, which does not really challenge WEDM's capabilities. There are some small wire medical projects out there, but they are either small production numbers, or at an R&D level.

I was referring to Turn-Key level activity in my reference to "special engineering & support." Makino offers and provides these engineering services, and customers have asked us to design and build production fixtures, determine and make the production programs, and to also create custom settings to tweak our equipment and the pending production process for BEST efficiency. These are all paid services, and a customer can pick and choose at what level of specialized engineering support they need.

You are correct in your statement about people that are doing medical based production having multiple machines. This is not a requirement to get started, but medical companies will look at and evaluate your production capacity, and they typically like to see back-up capacity in the event a machine goes down (no loss of production to them). My advice to you entering into the medical market would be to start small, take on 1 smaller production number job, make and establish the relationship, and see where it goes. If you are used to doing high-end "niche" work, you could possibly use this to your advantage...small volume - high quality based machining.

-Brian

Not a Salesman? :-)

Brian,

Marketing BS? I guess your not a salesman

Now that you refreshed my memory, you are correct I have seen a lot of what I would call "low end" and "inexpensive" EDM machines used to make medical parts.

I guess a lot of Medical production houses might not have the "job shop" experience or personnel to figure this stuff out. The OEM has seen a lot more applications and tricks. I myself have done a lot of "macro B" programming which has help on many jobs we do. But usually we are weak on great fixtures because the jobs never repeat that much. Usually if we get a great fixture and everything is running great, we than find out it is the end of the product cycle.

Researching medical applications it seems like there are two areas, implants (those devices that go into the body and stay there) and what I will call "tools". It seems as though the implant work requires more "paperwork" and such and is likely harder to get into to. Do you have any experience in this type of thing?

Have you seen where someone wants to say, these parts have been made on X brand machine and thus we need to continue making them on X brand machine and we don't want them made on Y or Z brand machines. Not that brand X is any better than Y or Z, just because the parts have been "proven" using that equipment?

Does the EDM equipment need to look like it's in "show room" condition as you are machining these parts? Like I say, we "run" our machines. I'm sure this is the situation for a lot of regular shops. We used to have a salesman that would come in and show people our equipment and we might do a little demo. I would tell him sometimes that well they are really dirty this week and well between now and tomorrow there's no cleaning going on. He would say, no problem I would rather show a "dirty" machine making parts all day than a clean one doing nothing. It shows that the equipment is making you money.

Ofcourse if anyone else would like to jump in here with their comments on the subject feel free.

But I guess a lot of people would not want to give up their secrets.