Remmele has a reputation for high quality workmanship and diverse manufacturing capability. Among the five manufacturing facilities that comprise Remmele Engineering are some of the largest machine tools in the Midwest. Products built by Remmele range from structural aircraft parts to large aerospace tooling. Remmele’s General Machining Division, which comprises two of the five facilities, provides a wide range of manufacturing services to support three primary businesses:

• Low Quantity Manufacturing - production of prototype, one-of-a-kind, and low quantity manufacturing of close tolerance, complex parts and assemblies.
• Large Part Repetitive Batch - Manufacture of larger repetitive batch parts ranging in size from a 2 foot cube to 100 feet in length and weighing up to 75 tons. These parts demand exacting tolerances and often require multiple machining operations.
• Design and Build of Tooling - Complete tool design and fabrication of large precise tools, including tooling for composite part manufacturing and large complex assembly fixtures.

Investment In The Best
Remmele has more than 120 CNC machine tools interfaced through a company wide DNC network. There are 25 varieties of NC machines at the New Brighton, MN facility and 15 at the Big Lake, MN facility. The key to Remmele’s productivity is its manufacturing system consisting of "generic" machines that can handle a variety of parts...such as machining airplane parts in the morning and computer parts in the afternoon.

Although its plants are filled with an array of high tech, state-of-the-art equipment, equally important are the machinists and the company’s NC programmers. In order to meet the strict quality control and delivery requirements of its customers, Remmele has made a tremendous investment in its in-house NC programming capabilities, which includes 12 seats of NCL multi-axis machining software. Because Remmele deals with aircraft manufacturers and the automotive industry, the attitude is to keep one step ahead of its customer's programming capabilities. According to Terry Morri, Programming Manager, NCL was selected because of its five-axis capabilities. Terry stated, "We wanted to make sure the vendor had a proven track record with five-axis installations, which NCCS had. Furthermore, NCL is a high-end programming system that allows for easy program maintenance and updates. When engineering changes or program optimization are required, we need only change the affected area. NCL will automatically rebuild any geometry associated with the change and regenerate the tool paths. All geometric entities and subsequent cutter motions are associated."

Another reason Remmele selected NCL is because it allows total control for their programmers. It is especially useful in complicated aircraft parts, whereby the programmers aren't limited to simple canned routines found in many PC based NC systems. In fact, most PC based NC systems do not offer realistic five-axis capabilities, and are often overwhelmed by the calculations required for tool offsets that incorporate angular orientation of the tool. The NCL system is parametrically driven, which allows the inclusion of numbers and formulas in the programming process, which in turn simplifies the creation of part families. When the parameters change from part to part, the data associated with the parameters changes automatically, so the user no longer needs to reprogram the modified areas.

Importance Of CAD With Manufacturing
Recently Remmele added another NCCS product to their engineering software trove - VARIMETRIX, which comes in handy for those customers that don’t have solid modeling capabilities. For example, some customers will send Remmele drawings and a wireframe of the part. As Terry Morri explains it, "By using the original IGES model, and building a solid model of the part in VX, we can develop tooling and add surfacing of the part required for machining. Since NCL is integrated with VX, we can take that data and develop our tool paths. We can then verify the cutter program. In turn, we can greatly impress our customers by showing them everything about their part on a monitor, sometimes with video conferencing, before we even make a cut. In particular, VARIMETRIX can read native CATIA^TM files directly. This allows us to interrogate the data in VARIMETRIX and make any necessary changes before sending the data to NCL. VARIMETRIX’s Inquire capability allows us to measure various model attributes, such as distances between two surfaces or the radius of a fillet. Imported models can be quickly measured, shaded, and rotated, thereby providing an excellent data analysis tool."

A Post Program That Works
Given the wide variety of NC equipment in use, it is vital that the output generated by NCL could handle the various machine/control combinations and complex rotary axes. In fact, Remmele has several 5 and 6 axis machines with a variety of pallet and head changers. To accommodate this vast and complicated array of equipment, Remmele relies on NCCS' universal postprocessor, PostWorks. PostWorks provides the user with an easy-to-use motif style interface for defining machine configurations and output file formats. The system automatically creates a solid model of the defined machine, which allows the user to visually verify and simulate the machine movements. Existing configurations can be used as input to create new configurations, this saves time when creating a post for similar machine/control combinations. With some 40 varieties of NC machine tools in their lineup, PostWorks is indeed a valuable tool to Remmele. Two programmers are assigned to the PostWorks program.

A Word About Training
Remmele believes that an investment in training is an investment in the future of the company. Most NC programmers have ten or more years of machine shop experience and have been taught to run literally every machine on the floor. Remmele employees have always been trained to perform a number of different jobs, ever since the late Fred Remmele, himself a highly-skilled machinist apprenticed in his native Germany, founded the company in 1949. As a result, training is an ongoing integral function of the business. In addition to on-the-job training, which is part of the apprenticeship, is a core curriculum of additional in-plant training for all employees that takes upwards of 100 hours to complete.

NC programmers spend one year in apprenticeship training, which includes attending NCCS training programs. When VARIMETRIX was brought on board, a week long class was held at the Remmele facility, with instructors from NCCS brought in.

The investment in training results in a highly skilled and dedicated work force. And run down the list of today's hottest manufacturing "buzz" words, and you will find them used as a matter of course at Remmele.