Urschel Labs, a manufacturer of industrial food reduction equipment

Cutting Food
Down to Size
Urschel Labs, a manufacturer of industrial food reduction equipment, relies on
in-house metalcasting to support its reputation for quality and customer service.
Shannon Wetzel, Senior Editor
R
ick Urschel jokes that his
great-grandfather was just
two years behind the mechanical genius of Orville
and Wilbur Wright, and if he
had been born a couple of years earlier…well, who knows? Instead, William
E. Urschel used his mechanical aptitude
to build a gooseberry snipper, and 97
years later, his namesake company is
the largest manufacturer in the world
of food size reducers—slicers, dicers
and shredders. It’s not quite flying, but
if you’ve enjoyed a potato chip, baby
carrot, chicken nugget, salad-in-a-bag,
canned green bean or peanut butter,
you probably have Urschel to thank.
Urschel Laboratories Inc., Valparaiso,
Ind., claims a 90% market share in fresh
fruit and vegetable size reduction and
manufactures its precision equipment
at a 5-acre facility in northwest Indiana,
shipping to 100 countries.
The facility includes machining, heat
treating, assembly, finished goods inventory, fabrication, knife production and
laboratory testing of the finished slicers
and dicers. Its cast parts are produced in
its captive in-house metalcasting facilities, which currently include green sand,
nobake and investment casting.
For decades, the majority of the
castings were bronze parts produced in
green sand. But five years ago, Bob Urschel, president of Urschel Labs, and his
son Rick, vice president of operations,
recognized their customers’ growing
demand for stainless steel parts.
“Our engineering department wanted
to move away from bronze, not because
of quality, but because of looks. The
acidity from certain foods gives bronze
an ugly green color,” Rick Urschel said.
“Our customers have a desire for all
stainless steel. We thought we needed
to be a little proactive about it.”
In order to accommodate the conversion of many parts to stainless steel,
while still having the ability to successfully cast some parts in bronze, Urschel
Labs invested $4.5 million to install a
nobake metalcasting facility within its
existing campus to eventually replace
the green sand facility. When the demand for stainless steel inevitably grew
stronger, the company wanted to be
ready to compete.
Only Solution
The $4.5 million nobake line at Urschel Labs features a conveyor system that automatically
transports molds from the sand mixer to shakeout. Here, a vehicle runs along rails to transport a mold to the conveyor line for pouring.
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When the decision to move to stainless steel was made, the Urschels were
confident the money would be wellspent, but metalcasting facility manager Kevin Leffew felt his confidence
crumble. After a decade working as a
molder in the green sand facility, he had
just been promoted to manager less than
a year before. Now he was being asked
to lead the way in developing a system
for a new type of molding material and
a new type of metal.
“For a year, I was in a charge of a
metalcasting facility I knew everything
about,” Leffew said. “Then one day the
Urschels and the heads of our engineering department stopped me in the
hall and asked me to look into making
stainless steel castings.”
Urschel Labs’ investment casting
facility was used for small, low volume
stainless steel casting jobs. But with only
MODERN CASTING / November 2007
Urschel Labs’ new in-house nobake metalcasting facility will enable it to meet its customer demand for stainless steel machinery.
a 60-lb. and 100-lb. furnace, the facility
machines is most important. We still
was limited in size and scope. The existsupply replacement parts to equipment
ing green sand facility was fine-tuned to
we sold 70 years ago.”
produce high-quality bronze castings,
Every company strives for quality,
and the company had been pleased
but the Urschels felt so adamant about
with the results there for years. But early
it that the efficiency of the new line was
experiments to adjust the green sand
not a main driver. They wanted a moldmixture to accommodate stainless steel
ing process that would accommodate
led to lower-quality bronze castings and
their two alloys and result in superior
subpar stainless steel castings.
castings. The new line saves time and
“That left us with building a new noprobably money, but Rick Urschel said
bake line,” Rick Urschel said. “We had
he didn’t care if it didn’t.
very few options.” A
“We didn’t build
nobake line could be
the nobake line to
designed to accom- “I viewed this as if it didn’t save money, we
modate the different work, my career at Urschel did it to save cusmelting temperatures
tomers,” he said.
was over.”—Kevin Leffew,
of the two alloys.
“The process here
What wasn’t an metalcasting manager
is almost priceless.
option was outsourcWe didn’t have any
ing. The Urschels feel
other solution, and
their most important advantage in their
if we did, it wasn’t a good one.”
market is the quality of their products. The
On the Line
only way they felt they could guarantee
the quality they wanted was to make
With less than a year under his belt
everything in-house.
as metalcasting manager, Leffew was
“We’ve outsourced very few things,
handed the task of researching and
but when we have, we found that we
facilitating the installment of a new castweren’t getting the quality we were
ing facility. He appreciated the trust the
used to getting out of our own facility,”
Urschels had in him but felt pressure
Rick Urschel said. “The quality of our
to get it right.
MODERN CASTING / November 2007
When Leffew was a young man
looking for a strong, stable employer,
a family friend said Urschel Labs was
the company he needed to work for.
But competition for a job there was
fierce, and for years, Leffew applied
for jobs and waited. After six years, he
was finally hired to work as a molder
in the green sand facility. When you’ve
waited six years for an employer, you
don’t want to let them down.
So after learning the company
wanted to start making stainless steel
castings, Leffew dug in, researching
and networking. “I found this industry
is the absolute best for quality people,”
he said. “I would open up the directory
of metalcasters, see who was doing
stainless steel, and call them up. Some
would offer advice right there. Others
would check out our website and then
call back later.”
Among the people who helped him
were Bill Kloster, Kloster, Corp., Glen
Greta, metalcasting consultant, Bill Kelley, Inductotherm, and Roy Pickhard,
foundry manager for Milwaukee Valve,
who brought in Leffew for a tour of the
facility’s nobake operation.
Leffew filled notebooks with the
information he was given. Urschel
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The DiversaCut 2110 Dicer is used to dice pepperoni, pickles, potatoes, onions, carrots and
cabbage, as shown here.
Because the size reduction equipment can be used for a variety of foods cut to a variety of
sizes, Urschel Labs has a testing facility onsite to test customers’ cutting specifications for
different applications.
Labs rented equipment from Palmer
Manufacturing to experiment with the
molding material. Every six months,
he presented what he found and issued recommendations to Bob and
Rick Urschel.
“The third time I met with them,
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they said, ‘Okay, let’s do it’,’’ Leffew
said, his eyes wide remembering.
“And I said, ‘What?!’”
For Leffew, who was acting on a
year’s worth of experiments, trust in
the advice of other metalcasters and
faith, the project felt like it could make
or break his career. As the lone guy
in charge of running the 11-person
shop, it was up to him to make the
$4.5 million investment work.
“I viewed this as if it didn’t work, my
career at Urschel was over,” he said. But
with in--house help from plant manager
Dave Whitenack, plant engineer Rich
Jones, the maintenance dept., and evironmental coordinator James Keilman,
the plan went into action.
MODERN CASTING / November 2007
MODERN CASTING / November 2007
33
Urschel Labs’ customers are increasingly requesting more stainless steel castings, which had been
cast via the company’s investment casting department before the nobake line was installed.
450 to Go
The nobake metalcasting facility
poured its first casting 11 months after
Urschel Labs broke ground for the new
line. By August, the staff was putting the
nobake line to consistent use, although
full production will have to wait for the
engineering department to sift through the
450 parts that will either be converted to
stainless steel or kept as bronze parts.
Bronze castings still will be needed
in certain situations, despite aesthetics.
In places where two parts rub or wear
against each other, bronze castings are
paired with stainless steel because of the
copper-base alloy’s natural lubricity. These
castings are located in housing chambers
separate from the path of the food in
order to avoid bacteria and e. coli fears,
as unfounded as they are.
“We built this ahead of our time, and
now we’re growing into it,” Leffew said.
“Right now is our chance to examine
every part, see which ones work as castings and figure out how to convert the
bronze parts to stainless steel. Because
it’s a new molding process and new
material, we need new patterns and new
gating systems.”
Kloster supplied the equipment for
the line at Urschel Labs. After a mold is
filled with sand and the automatic vibratory compaction of the mold is done, it is
transported via conveyor belts through a
four-zone preheater that heats the chemicals in the sand to dry the mold. Then,
an operator applies an alcohol or waterbased flow coat to the mold to improve
surface finish. The mold travels through
a six-zone drying oven to be dried a
second time. When the mold comes out
of the oven, the filters and cores are set.
Then the mold goes into a closer where
the cope and drag are put together, after
which the mold is released to the staging
line, ready to be poured.
Two 600-lb. Inductotherm furnaces
furnish the stainless steel alloy. Argon gas
is bubbled up into the furnaces in order
to create an inert environment for the
stainless steel. A third, 300-lb. furnace is
used for bronze.
Urschel Labs utilizes a core shooter
from Palmer Mfg., and thermal sand
reclamation equipment from Gudgeon
Thermfire International.
Originally, Urschel Labs expected
the final casting ratio to be around 80%
stainless steel and 20% bronze, but now
Leffew thinks the percentage of bronze
castings could be higher, in part due to
new findings of anti-microbial properties
in copper-base alloys. If that turns out to
be the case, they can use one of the 600lb. furnaces for the bronze.
Just in Case
Urschel Labs’ small metalcasting section runs as a department of the entire
company rather than a business unit.
As a small company, it is comfortable
relying on the experience of its staff to
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MODERN CASTING / November 2007
MODERN CASTING / November 2007
35
produce high quality products.
The price of the individual parts
is not as big of a concern. When
the engineering department
gives a new casting job to the
metalcasting facility, Leffew
said he’ll provide a rough estimate of the cost of the pattern,
and then figure out how long it
will take to make the part and
abrasive finish it after casting a
few trial pieces. But there is no
formal costing procedure.
As Rick Urschel said, the
company doesn’t run its own
metalcasting facility in order
to cut costs. The flexibility
and availability of the facility
to respond to new jobs or
order changes is worth whatever few dollars the company
might have saved through a
bidding process.
Urschel Labs works with
lead times of eight to 10 weeks
on new orders and is ready
to send replacement parts
or equipment within hours.
It is able to do this by keeping $17 million worth of part
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Above, the 600 lb/
minute sand mixer
has the capability
to switch recipes
from one pattern
to another without
causing a delay.
At left, cores are
placed into a
nobake mold.
inventory, operating on what
Urschel calls a “just-in-case”
philosophy.
“In an industry working
with perishable goods, no
customer wants to be stuck
with a dock full of green
peppers and a broken dicer,”
Urschel said.
When a customer needs a
part as soon as possible, the
company can ship what they
have in the inventory and
order up more parts from the
metalcasting department to
replenish the stock. In this
way, the casting facility is a
lot like a job shop, working
on various orders of different
sizes and volumes.
Urschel Labs’ new molding
line is designed to facilitate
frequent changing of patterns
and metal. The sand mixer can
dispense different recipes with
the push of a button from one
mold to the next. And although
the line is equipped to run 30
molds an hour, Leffew can’t
imagine running it to that
MODERN CASTING / November 2007
speed. The time invested in making sure
each mold is precise is worth it to him
if it means less time spent in finishing,
less scrap and a higher quality part.
With the automation of the new line,
Leffew expects it will be more economical overall than the matchplate green
sand lines, although some parts may
increase in cost due to the change in
material. Eliminating the wear and tear
on the employees is a bonus, as well.
Growing Pains
Leffew would like it if all the work
was transferred from the green sand
room to the nobake line, but it will
take some time as patterns are changed
and the process is mastered. For a
metalcasting department that is used
to bronze and green sand, it still has
a lot to learn about stainless steel and
nobake. But Urschel doesn’t feel the
pressure yet to push the transition to
move quicker.
“We’re pushing Kevin, but the
window has always been big,” he
said. “Because it’s a new process, and
there’s the green sand facility to manage,
we understand it won’t be quick.”
When Urschel was 10, he spent
his summer days doing chores at the
company’s facilities. His favorite spot
was the green sand room, where he
often pushed a broom, cleaning up
shakeout sand and accumulating dirt
and grime on his clothes and face, to
his mother’s chagrin. It was paradise
for the boy. Leffew remembers one day
when he first began working at Urschel
Labs when Urschel asked if he could
help. Leffew had to answer sheepishly
that he didn’t know if he could help,
because he just started himself.
Leffew spent 10 years molding in
green sand and eventually felt like he
knew the place backwards and forwards. Now, he’s learning again.
During a sweltering Indiana summer
day, the first day of August, Leffew
walked out the doors of the new nobake
facility, stepping through the green sand
room on his way to the machine shop.
He waved his hand across the three
matchplate lines, not yet running so
soon after lunch break had ended. The
place was already beginning to look
barely used as the metalcasting workers
split time between the two facilities. It
was quiet in there—cool, too.
“You know, I’m going to kind of
miss the green sand facility,” he said,
MC
“It’s where I grew up.” MODERN CASTING / November 2007
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