The right choice for Swiss machining

The case study talks about how Oregon’s Pacific Swiss relies on ESPRIT to supply precision-machined parts to worldwide customers, leading to impressive results, from the most complex parts not taking more than a day to programme to enhanced productivity.

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Pacific Swiss Manufacturing is an all-Swiss machining job shop, in business since 1995 in the Portland, Oregon suburb of Clackamas. With its nine citizen Swiss turning centres, the company provides specialised micro/miniature and Swiss-turned manufacturing services to a diverse customer base that includes the medical, dental, aerospace, and motion flow control industries. We work with a variety of different industries,” says Scott Durkee, CNC programmer, Pacific Swiss for the past year, We go after anything our machines can make; we are very diverse in our offering.”

Bottlenecks and missed opportunities

Prior to adopting ESPRIT, Pacific Swiss did most of their programming by hand. They occasionally used a basic CNC editor that came with their machines, but it was not much help, offering only minimal calculations and a cumbersome cut-and-paste program generation process. Lots of pen and-paper calculations,” says Kevin Wilhite, Quality Engineer, Pacific Swiss, It was gruelling, to say the least— very much trial and error a lot of the time.”

“Programming was a bottleneck; machines were waiting for programs,” agrees Durkee. Week-long programming sessions were followed by multi-day set-ups and on-machine program verification. He continues, We used to probably take a three-day setup, wheeling through the program to check it. Mistakes, like a misplaced decimal point or negative sign, would crash the machine, and we'd have to order a new tool or fix the machine.” Even with the formidable talent that the Pacific Swiss team brings to the table, the potential complexity of 7-axis Swiss machining Citizen L32) the shortcomings of basic programming tools meant that the shop had to occasionally turn away lucrative work that they deemed too complex to program by hand.

Pacific Swiss meets ESPRIT