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Ensuring Continuity of Supply for a Specialist Plough OEM
Overview
Chapmans were approached for help by a long-established European plough OEM, well respected within their geographic sales area. Key strengths are their presence in the organic sector, their machines being particularly well suited to chalk and limestone conditions. Ploughs are available for all field sizes: light-weight models starting from a modest two bodies up a to top-of-the-range reversible 16 body semi-mounted design.
Issue
Our client was reliant on their historic local producer of plough shares which were supplied as full forgings – but the forging hammer required a costly upgrade. This left our client without a viable supply route for this key component without which they would not be able to build new machines whilst their spare parts market would be open to other after-market competitors.
Design Brief
Any new product had to fit onto existing machines already in service. Given the nature of the soils in the client’s main market it was also felt that a separate replaceable point was not required, rather a classic share available in traditional 14” and 16” sizes. The simplicity continued as instead of another forging, a flat two-piece design was proposed, with a fabricated protection fin to facilitate fitment onto the plough frog. The client wished to undertake final welding and finishing in-house having available spare capacity, with Chapmans to supply kits for this purpose with scheduled deliveries timetabled throughout the year.
Our Proposal
Given the very specific shape of the share with a large front nose to enable easy ground penetration and a rear cutaway, a laser cutting process route was selected so that tooling costs could be minimised. This gave the added advantage that the fin could be multi-nested from the same steel sheet in line with the kit principle. Holes could also be added without an additional punching operation. We challenged the client’s thinking that the share should be completely flat, given that their previous share had a shallow form to help turn the soil over. We thus suggested retaining the form, using a standard tool from our extensive tooling register to replicate this.
The Result
Not only did we meet the original brief, we exceeded expectations in that the client was able to recruit and retain higher calibre welding operatives than previously, but they were particularly impressed by the addition of the form at no extra cost: a forming operation simply replaced a flattening operation in the process route. Repeat orders have been secured and, having found a solution to this issue, the client will transfer other business to us in due course.