The Colorado-based OEM shop is known for their one-of-a-kind deburring and chamfering machines, but they also have a precision-focused machine shop that’s willing to take on any project that comes their way. If you’re in the market for a low to medium volume machine shop who guarantees quality products, reach out to James Engineering today at (303) 444-6787.
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What is our shop capable of?
Dave: We have 3 mills and 2 lathes. One of the mills has 4th axis capability. We’re capable of holding concentricity within 5/10ths in most cases without have to do any crazy set ups. We can do round parts, square parts, just about any shape part that you want.
Scott: We’ve got a live tool lathe with a bar feed option and multiple seats of programming software. We’ve got that 4th axis mill, another smaller mill with a 20-inch bed, and we’ve got a 60-inch bed large mill.
How many parts a week do we typically make?
Dave: That’s pretty subjective because we do short run production, so most of our time isn’t spent making parts, it’s getting ready to make a part and getting a part set up to run. Typically, we could spend half hour programming, half our setting up, and basically we could run for 15 minutes and then be done (in some cases). We can’t really quantify the quantity of parts per week because we’re more set up to be a tooling or prototype shop versus a production shop.
Can customers send in their own designs?
Dave: We quote on stuff and have stuff made for outside companies. We have engineering services, so people can send in a concept and we could do the whole thing, or they could send in a thing that’s basically done and we could create drawings for them, things like that. We have start-to-finish capability, or we can pick up a project that they’re already halfway through. We can also provide good drawings, give them a model.
What are some basic jobs we do frequently?
Dave: We do a lot of gun parts, automotive stuff, motorcycle parts. It really is just a gamble. Basically, anybody who walks into the door with a project, we can take a look at it and see if it fits our capabilities fairly easy and we’ll do it. We’ve done a lot of welding jobs lately, too. We’ve done a lot of stuff for RoboCon; we’ve made a lot of platforms and fixturing. We’ve made brownie bowls, and stuff for volleyball companies, it doesn’t really matter what industry comes in.
Scott: So we’ve got a lot of high end, high precision parts that we make. For example, we’re making a mount for a vehicle right now. Our perfect job is a volume job. We’re really looking for anything from prototype to a few thousand parts a week. I wouldn’t call ourselves high volume where we’re tens of thousands of parts per week, but we’re definitely looking for that low to medium volume area.
What makes our shop stand out?
Dave: Our attention to detail and the quality of our parts. That’s something that we take a lot of pride in. We try to go that one step above, whether it’s by deburring or not putting a scratch on it by pushing it across surfaces, things like that. We take really good care of all the parts we make, and it’s a lot easier to go in and get the quality you’re looking for when you’re not making thousands and thousands of parts.
Why is it significant for our machine side of business that we make our own parts in-house?
Dave: We can control our own quality because our standards are really high. To be able to get the tolerances and stuff we need we can hardly get other people to make them for us. We put a dimension on a drawing and expect you to hold it, so in some cases we put really tight tolerances on things with reason, and when other companies see those tight tolerances the cost goes up automatically (whether it’s justifiable or not). It’s more cost efficient for us to do it.
Scott: We have to make all of these parts here in-house because we really can’t afford to job much of this out. We’ve got to keep our profit margins where they need to be. We have to hold pretty precision fits because we’ve got a 3.2 million resolution encoder here turning all of these [parts] on this five-axis manipulator.
How do your own deburring machines fit into the machine shop process?
Scott: When we make these parts, we do a lot of in-machine deburring. We’ll go through and we’ll machine this edge with a chamfer tool. But the problem is, when we machine the edge with the chamfer tool, the chamfer tool creates two sharp edges. We still have this problem where a technician has to go in with Scotch-Brite and deburr this. So we don’t want that abrasive to get into our CNC machine, because if that abrasive gets into our machines, it gets down into ways and slides and it wears the machine out. That’s where the market is for our deburring machine.