b'Productive TimesKEEPING STEEL WHEELS SPINNINGW hether a railway carriage car- center or scrapped.ries freight or passengers overEach wheel traditionally is placed the 225,308 km (140,000 miles) ofon a machining center using a fork-track in the U.S. railway network,lift, a crane or another manual han-wheel sets wear out and must bedling methoda slow, inconsistent re-profiled or scrapped when out- process in which worker safety is a side the tolerances set by the Asso- concern. When workers place hooks ciation of American Railroads. Sincearound a wheel to lift it, there are 1910, Simmons Machine Tool Corp.,potential pinch points, so person-Albany, New York, has built machinenel risk suffering from repetitive mo-tools and measuring machines fortion injuries or even having hands producing and maintaining railwaycrushed under the wheel, said Scott wheel sets. The company also man- Mitchell, manager of turnkey proj-ufactures automation systems. ects at Simmons Machine Tool.WhenwornwheelsetsarriveAll those things are there be-at an AAR-certified railway wheelcause the operator has to manually maintenance facility, the end capsmove the wheel, he said.and bearings first are removed andWhen the machine builder de-manually inspected. The serial num- signed its new Wheel Turning Cen-bers for each wheel set componentter, a vertical CNC lathe for machin-then are entered into a supervisorying railway wheels, its goals were to control and data acquisition system.maximize worker safety and boost A measurement machine qualifiesproductivity to avoid repair delays. the parameters of a worn wheel set.For the WTC-60 model, Simmons Based on that data, a wheel set isautomated most of the process to either re-profiled on a machiningavoid making operators manually Simmons Machine Tool chose the ZP-6 overhead gantry with a two-axis robot to provide most of the material-handling capability for the Wheel Turning Center, a vertical CNC lathe for machining railway wheels.42JUNE 2020 ProTimes.indd 42 5/15/20 9:59 AM'