Forest City Gear Director of Technical Operations Jeff Mains wants to make life easier for you. He will be instrumental in putting in place all the resources for a fast, highly efficient lean manufacturing cell dedicated to producing a customer’s part family in high volumes. “We have a well-deserved reputation for tackling gear production challenges that many of our competitors won’t touch,” Mains says. “These gears are generally very high quality, in volumes of as few as one, and with increasingly complex features and made with hard new materials that can be tough to machine. Why not offer this same expertise and problem-solving capability to customers that have more dedicated, higher volume requirements?”

Forest City Gear is actively seeking a customer, or customers, that have higher volume parts production requirements. Forest City Gear would build a dedicated machining cell designed to optimize the production of that customer’s particular part family, thus helping the customer reduce inventory, floorspace, manpower, machine investment and, ultimately, workpiece cost. Forest City Gear of course benefits from a predictable, repeatable, and very manageable workflow. Mains says Forest City Gear would likely design and build a cell with all the components necessary to produce gears from blanks to finished gear.

“Right now we’re quoting a cell for the production of a part family of automotive transmission gears that would require turning, shaping, deburring, shot peening and inspection,” Mains says. “Other cell scenarios would of course include other soft manufacturing and hard finishing technologies. All would involve some level of load/unload automation. We would allocate existing floorspace in one of our plants or perhaps build out additional floorspace to accommodate the cell. The end result would be a system producing gears with typical Forest City Gear precision – but at much higher volumes.”