Quick Shop: CNC Machine “Emergency Room”

When you crash a CNC machine, it’s the ultimate emergency situation. Immediately, you contact your distributor for help. You have a production run that absolutely cannot wait, so your need for speed is urgent. Often your distributor can get what you need quickly, but what happens if your spindle isn’t in stock? And you still need that spindle STAT? Upon receiving the call, Okuma’s Mechanical Exchange department gets to work, pulling a spindle that’s in-house for repairs, to see if we have all the needed parts. At this point they might discover something is missing, maybe a flange, or a collar, or a labyrinth. That’s when the guys come to me in the Quick Shop, Okuma’s “emergency room” for fast repairs.

Quick Shop, Ready for Your Urgent Care

Located here in Charlotte, the Quick Shop is designed to handle urgent customer needs, and we keep this in-house so we can take care of them as quickly as possible. When I receive a job, first I create a production order to get the part into our system and find the material that’s needed. Then I get to work on programming, and I make the part and do all the inspections. Finally, I hand it over to shipping to go out to our customer. Very often, this entire process happens in just one day.

In my 35 years as a machinist, I’ve developed the skills to run almost any type of CNC machine, from a grinder, to a mill, to a lathe. So I’ve worked with a lot of processes and parts. The Quick Shop has everything I need, including machines for milling, turning, and surface grinding, plus several manual machines. We also have 5-axis machining capability. We can do flame hardening, and for small items we can apply black oxide coating.

Tapping Creativity

Life in the Quick Shop suits me well, for a couple of reasons. First, I like to stay very busy! If I don’t have a project in front of me, I go around asking people for work. Fortunately for me, that almost never happens. Because even if we don’t have a customer emergency, I can make parts for stock. Secondly, I really enjoy the fact that I have a new and different challenge every day. When we don’t have a part, this typically means it’s a unique “one-off.” So I get to enjoy the creative challenge of creating a new program or a special fixture using my experience and the skills I’ve developed over my years in manufacturing to come up with a solution – all in one day. When I’m finished, I go home and sleep well. It’s rewarding work, and I’m sure many machinists and engineers out there can relate to this.

Whatever It Takes

Of course this would all be much easier if down machines typically happened at 8:00 in the morning. But usually they come in during the afternoon. That’s OK, and my mission is always to ship out to the customer as soon as possible. If I say the part can be done, and can ship out at 7 p.m., I’ll stay until 6:00 to get it done. To me, the customer is number one, and I love to stay late to make the customer happy. “Whatever it takes” is my mission every day, and I’m proud to help our customers keep their CNC machines running. Hopefully now you can sleep better too, knowing the Quick Shop is here when you need it.

Minh Huynh (pronounced “min win”) is Senior Machinist, Quick Shop, Okuma America Corporation.

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