Our Process

Most of our machinery is CNC equipment which was custom designed and constructed for the task of producing replacement blading. We would like to stress that there is a very real difference between our machinery and conventional CNC mills. This difference enables us to specialize in short runs, without having the engineering department camped out on the shop floor.

Our usual customer input is a sample blade. We can reconstruct the original geometry of blades that are amazingly chewed up and hammered on. We also work from "back of the envelope" sketches, mathmatical formulae, and can even deal with actual engineering drawings. If desired, we can supply drawings of our reconstruction work, including manufacturing dimensions and tolerances. These can be used by the customer for approval prior to manufacture, for local job coordination and control, or customer-based quality control.

Setup

With our custom designed CAD/CAM system, a blade is described as a series of surface forms such as round tenon, common airfoil and rectangular root. Our system has an entire computer library of these surface forms. To set up our machinery, the machinist goes to an ordinary word processor and makes a list of the surface forms he would like the machine to cut. Within each surface form entry, he specifies the dimensions unique to that blade, he enters the dimensions of the cutter that will be used at that step. He then saves the text on a floppy disk, and that's it for the setup.

The Trial Blade

The machinist then loads the floppy disk into the particular machine assigned to that job, pushes the "go" button and makes a trial blade. If, say, the stream expansion slope at the bottom of the air foil comes out a little shallow, it is a simple matte to take the floppy disk back to the world processor and entered a different number to change the expansion slope. This is not possible with conventional CAD/CAM systems or conventional CNC equipment, such a correction would involve the engineering department and take much longer. Since our machinists have this much control over the equipment for the entire job, we can set up and start cutting in the minimum possible time.

Our Surface Form Library

Since our CAD/CAM system was developed "in house", we can develop new surface forms as needed and integrate them into our existing computer library. If the customer needs an unusual form, say a buttress support ledge for the airfoil trailing edge, we would develop this as a generic surface form and add it to our library. Over the years, we have built up an extensive computer library, and we are continually adding to it.

Blade Alloys

The alloy we typically work with is turbine blade quality 403 stainless steel, which we order directly from the steel mill and maintain in stock, other alloys can be used at customer request. Certification is available at no charge.

Quality Control

Our quality control is a manual process, using mechanical and optical measuring equipment and fixture gauges. The process is based on the simple fact that we are truly concerned about our product. Since we specialize in replacement blading, we can focus this concern on the areas of quality needed on the repair shop floor. For example; when reblading a rotor, particularly the second or third time, the rotor groove is seldom the same size and condition as it was when new. For this reason, the blade roots must be made to fit the present rotor, not the factory specification.