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Back in January, FMD reported on Forest City Gear (Roscoe, IL), a family-owned gear manufacturer that reinvests between 25 to 40 percent of their annual revenue to keep business strong (“Invest To Be Best”, FM Digest, January 9). In this issue, we revisit FCG as a follow-up to see if and how this strategy is helping the company navigate through the difficult economic waters of the current recession.

Fred Young, the CEO of the company, details how the numerous factors of physics, math, material science, machine tool technology – and especially the wave of new applications and new materials in certain markets today – all impact the gear making and gear finishing businesses. As such, “we keep our machinery, equipment and people on the tip of the sword, technologically,” he says. “These investments allow us to do much more for our customers and even a few of our competitors, who use us for specialty work.”

In these tough economic times, Young continues, “it’s the diversity of customers and the broad range of gear solutions we can bring to them that enables them to survive and thrive in these most difficult times.” Here are a few illustrations of the diversity that keeps this “tip of the sword” finely honed:

Motion Control, Inc. (Salt Lake City, UT), one of the Fillauer Companies, is a world leader in myoelectric prosthetic devices and the makers of the world-renowned Utah Arm, the most advanced prosthetic elbow/hand in the industry yet built for above-elbow amputees. The development of this unique device was done by Motion Control and the University of Utah’s Center for Engineering Design and is today in its third iteration, the Utah Arm 3.

This device incorporates two microcontrollers for the elbow and hand, thus separate and simultaneous control of both are possible, allowing the wearer a more natural feel and free-flow movement. Many veterans of the War in Iraq have been fitted with the Utah Arm 3 at Walter Reed Medical Center and Brooke Army Medical Center. Motion Control also released the myoelectric hand and Electric Terminal Device (ETD) to complete its line.

With a strong motor, strong fingers, battery save feature, wider grip and quick disconnect wrist, the MC Hand offers speed and rugged wear performance. Motion Control follows rigorous FDA and ISO quality control standards. “We have partnered with FCG since its earliest versions of the Utah Arm,” according to Roger Morandi, documentation manager at Motion Control. “Quality and reliability are crucial in creating the precision sector gears and pinion gears for all three of our flagship products, namely, the Utah Arm, Motion Control Hand and ETD.”

For many years, the sector gears were made for the Utah Arm in a multi-step process that included machining two separate parts, welding those together, grinding down the weld, hardening the part, having FCG cut the teeth and do some final machining. The time and cost involved merely to move the products from one vendor to another were substantial. Typically, a 10-15 percent product loss was experienced in this process.

FCG proposed single sourcing for the product and the job was awarded to them. As Morandi puts it, “We now just send them an order while we concentrate on our customers. This enables us to quickly receive high precision gears at a better price than we were paying, without the hassle of chasing the products from one vendor to another.”

At U.S. Reel (St. Louis, MO), their new SuperCaster 1000 has a same-direction, no eyelet, virtually friction-free and very high-speed retrieve rate, owing in large part to the internal gear mechanism built by FCG. According to company president Fred Kemp, “We’d produced our design to the CAD stage in Catia, SolidWorks and Pro-E formats, working with an outside consultant and our manufacturing partner. It was a combined engineering effort, using GearTrax software from Camnetics. We’d been referred to Fred Young by our consultant, Bob Benzinger. Upon first meeting he and Mike Goza (the product manager) and learning they were both passionate fishermen, we quickly realized we had a receptive ear for our needs.”

Kemp described the part they’d designed as a 7075 aluminum gear with internal helix, 0.45 module. The part was being wire EDM’d by U.S. Reel’s manufacturing partner and the weak area on the teeth was consistently breaking. Then, working with Young and Goza, Kemp explains how they had a “Eureka moment” when FCG discovered two inconsistencies in the initial design and “simply worked harder to overcome them for us.”