Coe Press Equipment Replaces
Outdated Air-Feed Systems
to Help Mexican Stamping
Manufacturer Stay Competitive

Small Parts has 150 employees on one shift, with two shifts running at times in a 120,000 sq. ft. building. They'll ship products within Mexico, to North Carolina and other areas in the US as well as Europe and Brazil.

"Even though our name is Small Parts, we also produce some medium to large parts," said Littlepage. "Our division has presses up to 275-tons in the Small Parts Companies. We also have some hydraulic presses for shallow draw work. The company doesn't produce any complex deep-drawn parts, but we do some tiny reel-to-reel work like terminals, and terminations for electrical components."

"We stamp the parts and then run them onto a reel. In some cases, after putting them on a reel, we'll send them out for service such as metal plating and then bring them back in-house and separate them. Then we send our customers loose terminals rather than the reel. We have a wide variety of different processes we do as well," remarked Littlepage.

Along with adding the latest presses and coil feeding equipment, Small Parts is also upgrading presses. They've taken presses and completely rebuilt them with new electronics and sensors in all of the stamping dies.

Small Parts maintains part quality is through the use of sensors in their stamping dies and using vision systems to pick out problem parts. "Our sensor application lab is focused on in-die part inspection," said Littlepage. "We're putting in sensors to interface between our stamping process and with our SPC program.

"We put sensors at different stations of the stamping die to identify critical-to-function dimensions for our customer and measure certain aspects of the part. So as the part's coming off, we're getting a 100% inspected product. We make about 350 different part numbers here, and I would say probably 250 already have in-die sensing," he added. In the near future, Small Parts will have sensor interface units on all its dies. It used to cost the company tens of thousands of dollars to do this to every tool. Now the cost has dropped to just hundreds of dollars.

Most of the work Small Parts does is progressive die stamping. They have one cell set up for secondary work such as transfer (non-robotic) or secondary stamping using a common blank that is turned into different part numbers. "We have a secondary stamping tool that's capable of creating different part numbers from the same blank. The secondary stamping operation would create a left or right-hand blank. For instance, where we put a hole could create a left or right-hand blank," adds Littlepage.

Small Parts does about 10% plastic injection-molded parts and 90% metal-fabricated parts. Littlepage said they're focused on the insert molding business. "We look at that more as a value-added service. The straight shoot-and-ship molding business is very competitive, and we're not interested in going head-to-head with these businesses. It's not really our core competency."

To service their customers, Small Parts has a fleet of trucks for daily runs to customers. "We also handle all of our own customs and exports for our customers that aren't in Juarez," he adds.

Back to Top