AMERICAN AEROSPACE ： From Startup to Space Supplier in just 12 years! ｜ Machine Shop Tour)

We started in 2011 so we're fairly young and now we're at over I think 24 machining centers, 35 employees. In 12 years you've gone that far. Everywhere I turn in here there's another giant machine that I'm not familiar with. Look at this Mitsui Seiki. What is this thing? It's next level like it's a fully automated machine shop right here. So to give us our tour we're here with David. David thank you very much for joining us. Yeah welcome. Now give us a little bit of background on the how you got started here with EMS. Kind of what was your process leading up to this shop right here? Okay yeah we started in 2011 so we're fairly young. Yeah me and my business partner decided you know we were working at different shops and we're like hey let's start let's start a shop. So started out with one shot, one machine. A little Haas machine and now we're at over I think 24 machining centers, 35 employees. So had kind of a rapid growth, organic growth. We don't have any investors or any outside capital helping us. Let's take a look at what we got going on back here. Sure. Starting out we have our horizontal machining center. So double pallet, standard kind of just standard machine. So we have one side tombstone and another side we're actually running a part with a custom fixture. Oh that's cool. What kind of part are we looking at here roughly? Aerospace? Aerospace but it's a big steel part so you don't want to fly that on an aircraft. So that's mostly for the tooling. Tooling side of being ground support. You know lots of things some people don't think about what it takes to actually build some of these spacecraft or aircraft. You guys have a ton of tooling here. Yeah this is our regrinds taking a look at you know what what's worth to regrind what's not and then sending it out. Oh wow. Now what kind of stock on tooling because I mean you have a lot of very consistent tooling here. What kind of stock do you guys keep with a standard ML you know with like a half inch forklift? Are you keeping hundreds on the shelf? What's kind of your turnaround on those? You know locally there's a lot of local stocks so we usually keep like you know depending on how how like like end mills yeah like 10 around 10 we have min max so you know when you have one in the left or two end mills left let's order more. This is our assembly area so kind of we do light assembly here we don't do a lot of big big assemblies but you know helicoils, key inserts, part marking, you know tapping, chasing holes. It's kind of done in this little section. And what kind of standards do you guys because obviously you know when you're getting into aerospace when you're getting into space flights up you can't just apply and send them apart and hope it's good. What kind of ISO standards are you guys hitting? What kind of measurements do you use for that? Yeah so we're AS9100 so going through you know all the first articles and all the in-process inspections to meet those requirements to you know meet the customer's needs. Cool very cool and what kind of material is that? That's actually aluminum it's like a it's anodized. Oh that's just anodized? Yep. I didn't know if it was delrin or some kind of plastic. We don't usually see that color so. No I haven't seen that color in aluminum before. So yeah getting to the more of the machines this is our like three axis cell we do a lot of like dovetail prep for our five axis here a lot of second op cutting the dovetail off so that's kind of what this section is kind of. Good general production machines. Yep. Now what kind of steered you towards Doosan maybe over some other machines that you were looking at? So we used to be all Haas shop so you came in here in 2015 you would see the gray and red all over so then we we kind of were having some thoughts about you know changing over and you know we started out you know in 2011 you know so Haas used machines cheaper so we just wanted to get some newer machines kind of building up to get more into the production and just reliability. Absolutely. Yeah. Wow you got a lot of machines in this space. Yeah so we're definitely packed in here so as you can see there we have quick change so we incorporate quick change throughout our shop so you can literally take that fixture and pop it on another machine. We've done that where over capacity or it's taking longer we need to switch machines so we just pop it on and go. For sure now keeping track of where those things are and keeping track of the programs and the fixtures you guys I mean we haven't even seen half this shop yet you guys have a ton of machines a ton of programs I imagine how do you guys keep that straight when you're doing this? I mean we have ERP system so we run ERP and as well as like other systems that we we've kind of developed in-house to keep track of you know where things are apart where they are in the process and and so on and so forth. And I take as you've been growing so rapidly getting those things established and getting the organization quick has been fairly critical for success here. Oh I see some manual machines you guys have a full setup over here. Yeah so we have some manual machines mostly for like you know some post-work or some polishing this is our benching section deburring so polish parts deburr parts you know the stuff that we can't hit on the machine and and yeah and then move on to the next step. And of course I want to know what this giant machine over here is. Yeah so this is a larger machine basically three axis I think we have 86 inches in the x we just finished up a job that was like I think six months long it was running day and night. Oh really? And they were full long full long stainless steel 15-5 parts. And do you run two shifts so day and night or is that more unattended light type machine? Yeah that was like they had long run times a lot of servicing a lot of like long operations so we let it run into the night. Now who does the programming when you guys are doing stuff like that is that the guys who are also running it or do you have more of a dedicated programming department? No yeah we have we have two programmers for mill they sit on the shop floor with the guys we found that being a lot more helpful than sticking them in an office somewhere because they need to touch feel the parts they need to talk to the machinist things are moving like I said we do a lot of short runs so they need to have access to the programmers the programmers need to change programs on the fly. You know we were out here the other day just on this part over here on this on this machine I'm like we need the run time down you know so we got we took 20 minutes off just working together and getting the run time down on it so. Now that machine there what am I is that a pallet? No so this is an extended tool changer so I think we have like 200 tools in here. Oh wow. So again we're running a little bit smaller apart than we typically do it's a little bit bigger trunnion so yeah again larger tool changer quick change tooling we actually have like five jobs set up on this machine. Oh no. It's not a pallet changer machine but with as many tools as we can have and the quick change tooling we can have you know a lot of jobs set up at once. And what kind of quick change tooling are you using on there? This is the Jergens quick lock system. Okay. We use their their vices and their their bases. Yeah I know we were running it in my shop as well and I said if you're in a big shop with a lot of changeover I can really see where it would count and I guess that's exactly what you're seeing here. Yeah no definitely we we definitely invested a lot in there continue investing it um as as we'll as we'll move on and see the the pallet changers it's really critical so. Look at this thing. So this is an Akuma we just brought it online um five five axis uh pallet pool machine so we're looking forward to get this thing running pretty much lights out um we want to be able to load this patentless this uh machine up with multiple part numbers and keep it running. Multiple part number? Yeah so we so like I said we're like a job shop so to utilize the pallet changers a little bit different than like a production shop where we can be running a part a short run part during the day um have it inspected and then run like something that's dialed in at night that's a little bit bigger quantity so that's just running all night day shift comes back in starts you know finishes their their their short run work and then it goes back to the production. Now I'm I've seen some of these Akuma pallets but is this one of those ones where you can actually tell which pallet uses which program? Oh yeah. So it will automatically call up you don't need to say we're going to run 10 of one program you can say pallet one is program x program uh pallet two is program y and it will just go do it. Yep. It's next level like it's a fully automated machine shop right here. Yep. It's crazy absolutely crazy. Look at this Mitsui Seiki. I actually am not very familiar with these machines so yeah this is interesting. So these are actually very high precision machines um it's they're out of Japan um they make limited quantities um and they almost like essentially build them by hand they hand scrape the ways um the accuracies are insanely good and they last forever like um you know I joke with people that you know in like 1990 it looks exactly the same. You couldn't even tell. Yeah but I mean they upgrade the you know the newer technology in terms of like um the the controls and all that stuff so so this is a five axis horizontal machine so it's like a trunnion machine but it's up 90 degrees so interesting which is really helpful with chip evacuation when we do these some of these big hog outs oh for sure that chips just fall right out and when you're doing aerospace stuff you're taking a block like this that weighs 100 pounds you're making it weigh five yep and about the same size so it's yeah you're right a ton of evacuation so that helps a lot it's a really cool fun machine and how did you get interested in Mitsui Seiki because I mean I I'm not saying I know a lot about the industry but I see a lot and it's a brand that I've heard of but you could tell you could ask me do they make Lay's Mills additive I couldn't tell you yeah how did you get familiar with um we actually got familiar with one of our friends um they had one or I don't my business partner was talking to him we got to kind of equate it and then one of our our like machine companies that sells us you machines like hey we have these two machines are you guys interested we're like oh Mitsui Seiki kind of got the conversation going they were down in Long Beach and you know I had to get rid of them so we ended up getting for a good price and I see you have tons oh this is for that machine yeah that's a tombstone pallet this pallet pool is a tombstone pallet pool right now we have about like 20 part numbers um dedicated to this machine um and we want to grow that it's interesting when you see tombstones people usually think you can only run or you should run you know four sides of the same part to get run time you actually have different fixtures it looks like on just about every side of these tombstones so you get set up one set up two set up three that's really really interesting and so depending on the like the rate um depending on some of the parts you know well it only takes like three days to run but we're going to run another set in a month so if we have a side on the tombstone that's open might as well keep the setup and then when the parts come back throw them on and keep on going more doosans that's uh oh you had another pallet pool you guys are really leaning into this automation yeah so really it's uh the pallet pools you know I think everyone's starting to get into them more and more um it's just definitely the way to go parts ready to go when that when that thing is uh when the um machine is done it'll switch the pallets uh and continue on its way and then the the operator will come by see that it needs to be changed tell if the pallets ready and so there's never there's never lost time where no I can have an operator here I can have an operator on this machine but actually working across the shop so it's insane and this is running right now and that's another five axis with the trunnion style wow that's crazy everywhere I turn in here there's another giant machine that I'm not familiar with yeah what is this so this is an armia um so they're very big in Europe or bigger in Europe um they serve more of the customized market where you go to like dmg and you're like I want to build this machine they're gonna be like yeah right you know so they will build anything that you want look at almost anything you can imagine but this is their you know this is just one of their standard machines but five axis but they can build it with four of those turntables three spindles as tall as this roof as long as this building oh so you've got flat table with vices you got a fourth axis and is that a five well essentially for this that's a five axis trunnion right so the b head moves wow look at that thing what kind of controller is that right um hiding height oh it is high nine so I mean you're familiar at least with the controller are there any weird considerations that you maybe didn't think of with buying a European machine that I mean I've never even heard of these guys no yeah I mean everything's pretty like I mean they all use a lot of the same internal parts as far as the spindles and all the you know stuff they use to build the machine so it's mostly available newer machines so we haven't had to really help or really had to you know work on the machine yet so we're gonna be getting another one it's always busy because it has a larger a little bit larger area for the five axis because we're always floating right up to that limit now what is this thing so it's a giant mill yeah so it's just a big mill gantry mill five axis so we do a lot of like aluminum panels for the aerospace industry structures panels CMS I'm not familiar with these guys at all most of their machines are like routers that do like more composites and like like more plastics and composites and stuff so we really only run aluminum on this machine sometimes we even rough parts out on other machines just because the horsepower and the it's not really built to be like a really like aggressively cutting machine a machine like this that takes up so much real estate and has so much versatility is an expensive addition no matter how you cut it right what kind of let you know that this was going to be able to utilize most of the time or at least be a worthwhile investment I'm just working with our customers and knowing what their need is right so you know when you see a lot of quotes that are like man these are really good you know parts I would love to make them but I don't have a machine so it's kind of talking with them you're like hey we get a machine yeah you gotta quote it you know as long as you're competitive so learning all that and getting into that so and has this thing paid for itself yet I think so yeah I mean I think we uh I think it's booked like for I think a good six to nine months no way yeah okay so you're laughing you're great so it's you know you always want companies to reinvest in what they're doing wow that thing's nuts I can see why you guys have so many chip pins out there now when I see the size of this yep they fill up quick oh you guys have a swiss yes so we have two swiss machines um this one's in the middle of a setup um yeah just 20 millimeters so we do like smaller pins again a lot of aerospace yeah um aerospace fitting so like generally you don't want to run like short run stuff on the right setup take a while but once they're running they hum for days on end extreme precision extreme production beautiful absolutely crazy and even these material racks yeah I've been to a lot of shops this is a very organized material rack we try to because you know we have sometimes we deal with like a lot of more expensive materials like in canals and stuff so just a little chunk of material is like you know two thousand bucks so you want to know where it is it doesn't want to go in the find someone supporting one of their tables with a chunk of that you'll be upset so we got more machines on the back side yeah so turning department so we have five turn centers two of them have mill turn beautiful and the others are these are nice little machines now with the footprint you guys have here this is a very economical use of space you've done really well with that if you had a plan to add more to this uh location obviously you're going expand and so on what would you be adding more mills more lathes more swiss kind of where is the focus right now we're kind of in the mode of we've had so much growth that we're just leaning out and we're just getting better at what we're doing and then after we get through that we'll be maybe looking at expansion our thoughts maybe might be moving or turning to a separate building and expanding turning and then we have room for mills right so that would be kind of like the next big jump and how many people you have 35 how many people here work kind of at a time is it all 35 every day or is it kind of a few people at night like our second shift but most of the action happens you know from six to four fair enough we're back to where we started back to inspections because when you're doing aerospace it's really nice to be able to make parts accurately unfortunately they don't care unless they come with inspection reports oh yes let's see this so we have our inspection department temperature controlled we have multiple cmm's giants look at the size of this thing now do you have people that just work here full-time in qa oh yes definitely so we have three full-time inspectors wow something that people don't consider you know it's nice to get the work but you also need to be able to hire and attract talent and train talent that can make sure your parts are correct otherwise all this is for nothing yes right there's lots of different um things that you know growing a shop and learning how to run a shop is you know you learn it and you have to know what um you know how to hire people and get get the right people in here do the right job and if people want to find out more about your company where can they go um our website um ems-mfg.com or online of course on instagram i know you guys are active there yep thank you very much for having us yeah thanks for coming by