Overseas Competition? Not a Threat

On the western Kansas prairie, halfway between Denver and Kansas City, is a high-tech machine shop. The Natoma Corporation machines small, close-tolerance parts and ships them to customers hundreds of miles away. Is foreign competition a threat? No way.

In fact, the company is thriving, and Founder/President Gail Boller knows all the reasons: top-quality work from reliable, top-quality equipment; short runs of small parts; an experienced and stable workforce; low overhead; and on-time deliveries that promote customer loyalty.

In what Boller himself affectionately calls "the middle of nowhere," a service call is a big deal. Because equipment dependability is a must, 13 FANUC RoboDrill high-speed CNC vertical machining centers, purchased from Methods Machine Tools through McClain Tool & Technology (a Methods delearship in St. Louis, MO) keep the company's milling, drilling and tapping on schedule.

"We've stayed with the RoboDrills because they're problem-free," Boller says. "They have strong toll-changer systems, and they're twice as fast as the machines we were using six or seven years ago. We run them every day, and their reliability has been excellent."

Boller's first RoboDrill was a used one he purchased from McClain Tool about 13 years ago. Its performance, together with McClain's attentive customer service, convinced him to add more.

"Service from McClain Tool has be great, and that's saying a lot," he continues. "If one of our machines goes down, we need someone to look at it the next day, and it's a 300-mile drive (from the nearest major airport) for one of their servicemen to come out here."

Boller had some bad experiences years ago with other machining centers, which he says were cheaper but poorly engineered. Though he is reluctant to discuss the details, he says some of these machines were not designed to handle chips: "You'd run them awhile, chips would start building up under the pallets, and you'd start losing your Z tolerances." McClain Tools took the machines back and replaced them with RoboDrills.

Today Natoma has five 4-axis RoboDrill E models (the newest models available), three long-bed PC2 pallet-changer RoboDrills, three older standard RoboDrills, and two RoboDrill Mates. Half of these machines run 16 hours a day, tended by five nightshift employees. The pallet-changer models are used for parts that require machining of just one surface and for the occasional longer runs of several thousand parts at a time.

On RoboDrill-milled parts Boller typically obtains surface finishes of 32 Rockwell, which he observes is "very good for a 30-taper machine."

The RoboDrill E model offers the speed, accuracy, and versatility needed to machine a wide range of parts. Exceptionally rigid, it is capable of high-speed milling comparable to much larger machines, lightning-fast drilling and tapping, and high-speed deburring. It also provides rigid tapping to 8,000rpm, peck tapping for blind holes, high-speed reverse tapping (up to 20 times faster than infeed), feedrates to 2,362ipm, rapid traverses to 2,125ipm, accelerations to 1.5G or more, and 0.9-second tool changes (tool-to-tool). With precision-enhancing thermal compensation and HRV control, the RoboDrill E boasts positioning accuracy of 0.0002" and repeatability of ± 0.000080". The sophisticated FANUC 31i-A5 Nano CNC provides control resolution of one nanometer, an optional 1,000 block "look-ahead," and a 0.4ms block processing speed, ensuring exceptional surface finishes and virtually eliminating servo lag and spindle dwell.

The RoboDrill E comes standard with a 14- or 21-station tool changer and is available with a 5/7.5hp 10,000rpm or 2/5hp 24,000rpm Big Plus spindle. To meet different machining and space requirements, it is available in three sizes with working cubes up to 27.5" x 15.7" x 12.9". Options include a fourth or fifth axis, coolant through spindle, a spindle measuring probe, and a laser tool setter.

Close Tolerance

A world-class ISO-certified contract manufacturer, Natoma Corporation specializes in the manufacture of small, closetolerance parts for customers in the aerospace, medical and laboratory instrument markets. The business is ISO 9001 and AS 9100 (for aircraft) certified, and all work for medical- and aircraft-related customers is documented. Extra services include CNC turning, CAD/CAM design, deburring, and finishing and plating.

One of 13 FANUC RoboDrills at Natoma, this RoboDrill E model offers the speed, accuracy and versatility needed to precisely machine a wide range of parts. Exceptionally rigid, it provides high-speed milling capabilities comparable to much larger machines, as well as lightning-fast drilling, tapping and deburring.

Boller loses no sleep over competition from Asia. Because Natoma's customers typically require relatively short production runs of only 100 to 300 parts, it is not practical for them to send the work overseas.

"We recently quoted a job for a company that had just returned 400 rejected parts to a contract manufacturer in Singapore and had to keep its lines going," Boller says. "The lower price wasn't worth the headaches. When it comes to low-volume runs of parts with very close tolerances, some of which can be quite complex, we don't have the problem with the Asian competition that high-volume shops have. We work with total tolerances of twotenths (0.0002") or less on many of our parts. It takes good equipment and good people to hold those tolerances, plus good inspection systems." In fact, an ISO auditor recently told Boller his shop came out ahead of every other contract-manufacturing shop he had audited.

The largest portion of Natoma's business comes from aircraft/avionics manufacturers - they making parts that end up in almost all generation aviation planes, including the Eclipse Light Twin Jet as well as the Boeing 737 and 747. Most of these customers are in Wichita or Kansas City, each of which is about 300 miles away. Many Natoma-machined parts for commercial aircraft end up in assemblies for directional gyro systems, radar units, and flat-screen integrated cockpit panel instrumentation. When a part is destined for military use, Boller and his employees sometimes have no idea how it will be used.

Approximately 60% of the parts Natoma makes are aluminum, about 20% are stainless steel, and the rest are copper alloys and machinable plastics. The RoboDrills easily handle all these materials.

"A typical part weighs less than an ounce, so you're talking very small parts," Boller explains. "A ½" endmill is huge for us. Most of the time we use a ¼" or smaller endmill. With two points of contact, the RoboDrill's Big Plus spindles provide much greater rigidity than most people would ever believe - sometimes I'm amazed that we can machine such tiny parts."

Dependable Labor

Natoma Corporation is in Norton, KS - population around 3,000. Boller named his company after the still smaller Kansas community where he spent his childhood and later, in 1982, started the business. "Natoma" is derived from a regional Native American term meaning "newly born."

"Our location actually works to our advantage," Boller asserts. "We've never had an employee quit to take a machining job in another town. We're the only shop in the western half of Kansas that does our type of machining. We don't have to compete for labor the way shops in the big cities do, and our employee turnover rate is very low. Of our 55 employees, 35 are machinists. All but three of them learned the trade right here."

Kansas real estate prices, about 1/10 of land costs in Denver, also have worked in Boller's favor as the business has grown. When he moved the company to Norton in 1984, it was a two-man shop with 3,000ft2. He expanded it in 1988 and again in 1995, and in 2005 he completed a 23,000ft2 addition that more than doubled the size of the facility, boosting floor space to 40,000ft2.

Boller financed the early expansions primarily by selling stock to his family and friends. "I wasted a lot of time talking to bankers and other potential investors," he recalls. "They said I'd never make it because my customers would all be so far away. I proved them wrong."

Such success, of course, would not have come without careful attention to customer needs and a reputation for on-time deliveries. Boller has his own plane, so he can make a quick trip to close a deal with an old customer or to court a new one.

"The distance between us and potential customers sometimes makes it tough to get in the door at first," Boller concedes. "The good news is that our location is not a factor when it comes to freight costs. Because we're only 60 miles from the geographic center of the continental U.S., shipping accounts for less than 1%, on average, of the customer's total cost. We ship almost all of our parts by UPS."

So, Natoma Corporation continues to grow, and for all the right reasons: precise, top-quality work from reliable equipment; short runs of small parts; lower labor and real estate costs; and attentive customer service. It's no wonder Gail Boller doesn't worry about foreign competition.