A Sound Investment
Mission Viejo, CA’s Q-Mark Manufacturing Invests in a DMG
Ultrasonic 20 linear Machining Center to Produce it’s
Advanced-Technology CMM Touch Probes. Story and photos by C. H. Bush, editor
Some people run into a problem and either don’t see it or totally ignore it. Others see a problem and com-plain, “I wish somebody would do something about that!” Then they move on. Then there are people like Mark Osterstock, founder-president of Mission Viejo, CA’s Q-Mark Manufacturing, Inc. who see a problem and solve it.
“That’s what I did in 1992,” Osterstock says. “At that time I was western regional sales manager for Zeiss, selling CMMs throughout the western states. Zeiss made a wonder-ful, beautiful machine, but one complaint I heard a lot was that it cost too much and took too long to get replacement tooling, things like the styli, the probes. That’s because they had to come from Germany. I went to Zeiss and suggested we start making the parts here, but they declined. After some thought, I decided this was a real opportunity to start my own business, and I took it.”
As it turned out, Osterstock had everything he needed to start a successful business.
“When I was a boy, my father owned a tool and die shop he had started right after World War II. As soon as I was old enough, he taught me how to operate a broom and had me sweeping the chips from under the machines. Over time I learned every machine in the shop, including the early CNC machines. As a result, I had the
machining
know-how to build the replacement parts for the CMMs. I also knew
most of the companies out there who had CMMs, and I knew the
customers who had complained about slow deliveries. So, in the early
90’s I resigned my position at Zeiss and struck out to make tooling
for Coordinate Measuring Machines. That’s how Q-Mark Manufacturing
was born.”Growth and Success
Like many fledgling businesses, Osterstock started in his garage with a few machines. But it didn’t take long before his business was doing well.
“We started making the products that my former customers needed to keep their machines running, and we gave them excellent customer service. As result, we grew very quickly.”
Today the company has 12 employees working in a 5,000-sq-ft facility, and operates a number of machines needed for production.
In the beginning Q-Mark didn’t do a lot of custom tooling. Even so, the company got a reputation for being willing to solve problems by creating custom probes.
“If a customer had a problem, we did our best to solve it for him,” Osterstock recalls. “The main thing was we understood the products the customers needed and the delivery problems they faced. The good thing was that once they tried our probes, they kept coming back, because our replacement styli worked well.”
Over time Q-Mark’s product line grew until today it offers styli for
all major CMM manufacturers, including Zeiss, Mitutoyo, Hexagon
Metrology (formerly Brown & Sharpe), and all the major portable
CMMs. The company also offers machine-tool styli, calibration tools,
a variety of ball grades, thread sizes and a full custom styli
production capability. “At the moment our catalog has about 600 different items in it,” Osterstock reports. “They can be bought from our distributors around the country, by calling us or by going to our online store at our website. Most of the products can be shipped same day, with some requiring second day. We have unthreaded and threaded styli and disk styli, used for measuring cylindrical shapes. Our styli range from three tenths of a millimeters in diameter up to about 25 millimeters. The main advantage of dealing with us is that customers gain domestically produced products with lower prices and faster delivery. Once people use us, they tend to come back, because they say our customer service is excellent.”
Osterstock’s team has one patent for a method for drilling holes in silicon nitride balls and a patent pending for its Cube Squared, which allows quick and easy cube alignment on CMMs.
“We’re constantly innovating, creating new products,” he says. “Our customers talk to us and we listen. The really big companies just can’t respond the way we do. It’s amazing the kinds of probes customers come looking for, but we never turn anyone away without first trying to solve their problem. Normally we solve the problem.”
Machining Headache Building the probes wasn’t rocket science, according to Osterstock, but it was important to understand the product.
“A touch probe has three basic components,” he explains. “There’s a base, a stem, and a ball. The base, which connects to the CMM, is made of stainless steel. The stem has to be extremely straight and stiff, because the measurements are created by the deflection of the probe when it touches a part. So the stems are made from graphite carbon fiber, which is light weight and stiff. We also use carbide and ceramics. The balls are normally made of synthetic ruby, which is extremely hard and resists wear from repeated use. Softer materials would simply wear out too quickly, deform and destroy precision.
”Of the three components, the ruby balls are the most difficult to successfully machine.
“The balls have to have holes in them sized to fit the stems, which can be as small as 0.3 millimeters in diameter,” he explains. “Try machining a .3-millimeter hole in a smooth ruby sphere too small to see with your naked eye, and you’ll realize how tough that is. There’s a matching peg at the end of the stem that fits into that ball, and then we use a bonding agent to hold the ball on the stem. The problem is that ruby is almost as hard as diamond and is really tough to machine. For years we were able to build the bases and the stems inhouse without problem, but we had to send the balls out for machining. We just didn’t have a way to machine them inhouse, which made it tough to maintain fast turn-around.”
A Sound Solution
For the past five years Osterstock and his team have searched for a way to machine both his silicon nitride balls and the ruby balls.
“We finally found a solution about a year ago,” he says. “It’s a DMG Ultrasonic 20 linear three-axis mill. It’s a small machine with a work envelope about the size of a ham sandwich, but it does an amazing amount of work for us. It allows us to use very small diamond tools to produce high-precision holes in the balls.
”The Ultrasonic 20 uses a 42,000-rpm spindle combined with a 30,000-cycles a second vibration to remove material. It has a Siemens 840D controller to guide operations.
“The vibration is really an up-and-down motion like a super high-speed jack hammer,” Osterstock explains. “Even so, the machining pressure is so low on our parts that we’re able to hold the balls with old-fashioned sealing wax. In fact, we recently machined a carbide ball held in wax. The opera-tor blew off the extra oil and the ball popped off. Being able to hold the balls with wax completely eliminates the possibility of damage to them. Of course our diamond cutting tools still wear, but we get such high productivity from the Ultrasonic that the tool cost is almost irrelevant.”
Productivity Increase
The Ultrasonic 20 has delivered numerous benefits to Q-Mark.
“For one thing, we can buy the balls undrilled and put holes in them cheaper than we can pay someone else for an already drilled ball or to buy them and send them out for machining,” Osterstock says. “But the real benefit for us is that it has helped us improve our customer service and turn-around times even more. Now we have total control of pro-duction. We buy the balls and drill them when we need them. With the Ultrasonic 20 we can drill a hole 5 millimeters in diameter, 6 millimeters deep in a carbide ball in about twenty minutes. That’s a major productivity gain.”
Drilling silicon nitride balls was even more difficult than ruby balls, according to Osterstock.
“Our silicon nitride balls are harder and smoother than the ruby ball,” he says. “These balls are perfect for high-volume measuring work because they’re so hard and smooth things don’t stick to them. You don’t get build up of material on them the way you do with ruby. They’re so durable they outlast ruby balls five to one. But they’re more difficult to drill than ruby, too. With the Ultrasonic 20, however, drilling even these are relatively easy now.”
Osterstock believes that the addition of the Ultrasonic 20 to his shop’s arsenal will allow his people to be even more creative than before.
“Having this machine takes away a major restraint on what we can create,” he said. “That’s because we don’t have to consider deliverability a major factor anymore.”
