Author: Leading Edge

Marlon Gaines of Leading Edge Turbine Corp wins a beautifully machined  “Amazing Grace” putter by Bobby Grace at the Hurco Grand opening raffle.

Alan Runge sets up one of six Chevalier Smart-B1224II Smart Grinders operated by Leading Edge.

Gaines had “zero customers” when he opened his company’s doors, he recalls. “I started out calling local people and telling them we do commercial grinding,” he says, “but in the beginning people were more interested in my skills in tool design, so I had some customers who found me and asked if I’d do tooling for them. We needed the cash flow, so I agreed. In any case, I didn’t have enough equipment to do a lot of production, but I had the equipment necessary to do the tooling, We started buying at least one new machine a year, which has worked out well for us.”

Charmilles Cut 20 P

Because Leading Edge Turbine Corp is principally a grinding house, he bought a Charmilles wire EDM mainly to help him produce his high-density fixtures.

“I looked around at a variety of EDMs,” he says, “but the Charmilles had conversational programming and an integrated CAM package, which allows us to design parts right on the controller or download an IGES or DXF file. Originally I bought the machine to help make my holding fixtures, but once I saw its accuracy capability, I began thinking beyond that. We use hard gauges to check our parts, so now we use the Charmilles to make those. I also discovered some benefits when I started producing turbine blades and vanes. I found that I was able to cut some features that are extremely difficult to grind because of accessibility. The Charmilles is now a high-quality and integral part of our production process.”

Gaines selected both the Charmilles and the Chevaliers, partly because of the quality of the equipment, but also because of the proximity of their sales and service facilities. “Our rep for Charmilles is Hans Baumgartner, who works for Infinity Machine Tool, a half hour away in Anaheim, California,” he says. “Our rep for the Chevaliers is John Chang, who works out of Chevalier U.S. headquarters, in nearby Santa Fe Springs. We get excellent service from both companies, which is exactly what we want. We can’t afford to have our machines down because of slow service.”

More Growth

Even after buying his own building two years ago, Gaines is once more faced with the prospect of having to move. “We have a huge new, 200,000-part order for turbo charger components for diesel engines,” he says. “They’re asking us if everything goes as planned, and they double the order, would we be willing to move to a larger facility. Basically, I’ve said, ‘Well, let’s see how it goes.’ At the moment we’re still in the engineering stage, completing our tooling and going through the first article stage. As it stands, we can handle this order in this facility by adding more shifts and people.”

Gaines seems both pleased and a little surprised at his business successs, but he hasn’t let it go to his head. “I’m a pragmatic individual,” he says, “so I take things slow and carefully. I don’t want to over extend.” Still, in spite of how busy his shop is, he is also looking to the future and his goal is ambitious. “I would like to dominate the profile grinding of turbine blades, at least in the Western States,” he says. “It’s a niche market, but it’s a great niche that has done well by us.”

Marlon and Julia Gaines discuss time schedules for producing certain features on a turbine blade.

Before taking the plunge into his own business, Gaines - a graduate manufacturing engineer - spent 28 years as a tool maker and designer for creep-feed profile grinding houses. During that time, he developed techniques for producing what he calls high-density fixturng. At the same time, he became well known throughout the industry for his fixturing expertise.

“A lot of grinders are still locked into using a clamping system or a low melting point matrix,” he says. “They hold the blades on these pins and encapsulate them with low melting point metal which means they have a square blob around the air foil. That, in turn, means there’s a lot of air between the parts, which is a very old and inefficient method, but amazingly some people still believe that’s the only way to do it. The problem with that is that production efficiency is greatly reduced. At Leading Edge, we use very high density fixturing with virtually zero air between parts. With high density fixtures I can grind ten to thirty parts in one setup, depending on part size, and, of course, be extremely competitive.”

Marlon Gaines sets up an OGP optical comparator used to check the profile on the parts. Leading Edge does 100% first article inspection as required by its customers. The company also uses a Winzel CMM to inspect air foils.

So what is Gaines’ secret that allowed him to achieve such rapid success?

“Well, our success is based on a combination of things,” he says. “First is that our customers trust us to deliver a product that works. We work with expensive customer-furnished investment castings of the turbine blades, and our customers are comfortable knowing that everything’s going to be done in spec, and they’re not going to have rejections. That trust is the main thing, but the second thing is our efficiency. In these times, if you have a high price, you’re not going to get the contract. We’ve learned to produce high-quality parts at extremely competitive prices. That’s where we’ve excelled.” Along with trust and competitiveness, Gaines says having a talented helpmate, experienced employees and good equipment are extremely important. “Julia is a real estate broker and has extensive financial, accounting and HR management experience,” he says. “Having her to worry about those things freed my time to fully concentrate on engineering and manufacturing. “And, of course, having great employees is extremely important, too,” he adds. “Our employees are very astute. They have a lot of experience with turbine blades. They know what the end result must be, and they sound the alarm when they see things that don’t look right. If they see a problem, they don’t just keep running parts, because they know what I expect, and they know what the customer expects, too. That also makes my life much easier.” Gaines’ attitude toward equipment is like most shops striving to produce quality parts. “We buy the best, most reliable equipment we can afford,” he says. “We require fast service if we need it, maximum reliability and quality output, which is why we chose both Charmilles and Chevalier for our equipment team.”