Insaco discusses a fasten-ating update: internal threading in hard materials now possible.
Insaco's Vice President of Sales Scott Mittl, sales engineer Geary Leatherman, and sales engineer Jackson Evans discuss the latest on internal threading in hard materials during GIE Media's April Manufacturing Lunch + Learn.
Thank you to Insaco for sponsoring our April Manufacturing Lunch + Learn!
Jake Kauffman: Hello, and welcome to the latest manufacturing lunch, and learn from GIE Media's manufacturing group. I'm Jake Kaufman. We are happy to be joined today by INSACO as they'll discuss a fascinating update, internal threading and hard materials that are now possible.
We'd like to thank INSACO for sponsoring today's lunch and learn they are a precision machining company that fabricates parts from all technical ceramics, sapphire glass, and quartz. Since 1947 INSACO has been synonymous with excellence in the development and production of high precision machine parts. Today we'll be joined by Vice President of Sales Scott Middle who has been an employee of INSACO since 1990, and is responsible for sales and engineering activity, including quotations and account management. Scott takes an aggressive, proactive approach to developing new customers and new product applications. Also sales. Engineer Gary Leatherman, who has been on the INSACO sales team since May of 2014. Gary is responsible for market saturation new business development and quotations and sales. Engineer Jackson Evans is the newest member of the INSACO sales team, joining in July of 2021. Jackson works directly with customers, utilizing his knowledge of ceramic materials and INSACO’s machining capabilities to ensure that parts requested will meet customers expectations to the fullest.
Now, if throughout today's presentation with Scott, Gary and Jackson. You can ask questions in the bottom of your zoom screen at the Q&A box, or also in the chat box, and we'll try to answer as many as possible before we wrap things up today. But without further ado, gentlemen, the floor is all yours. Thank you for joining us today.
Scott (INSACO Inc.): Thank you, Jake again. My name is Scott Middle, and I haven't heard that bio in a while. I think I wrote that quite a few years ago. So we have something that's very important that we want to try to get out there. And that's how we're doing with regards to tapping holes and internal threads. But before we get into that I would like to take just a couple of slides and sort of explain INSACO, maybe to a little bit greater depth than what Jake had provided. So INSACO is an acronym for Industrial Sapphire Company again, 1947 was when we started. We actually started in a barn at the other end of this property. We're on about an 80-acre site. We are now in an obviously, we're not in a barn. We're in a new facility that we built in 1963, but the business originally was called Industrial Sapphire Company but we changed it to INSACO in order to have people understand that we're doing more than just sapphire. It's commonly mispronounced.
And that's why it's always sometimes important to just say it stands for Industrial Sapphire Company, and that becomes then INSACO. The business itself started 78 years ago. Again, we only say 78, because it's a little bit of a play on number because the business was started with sapphire phonograph needles. So there's a picture of a sapphire phonograph needle on a 78 record. But we've really gone into many different applications over their 78-year history into aerospace medical defense semi, as written on the slide, as well as compound semi and clinical chemistry, and lots of other different applications where ceramic is useful.
the facility itself. This is the front of the facility. As we approach it. We're about 50,000 square feet we're occupying about.
Well, I have about. I'm sorry, about 300 machine tools, and we're running about 65 employees, and we're running a 2 shift operation. And in that facility again we're doing lots of different things. So I'm going to now turn it over to Gary, and he's going to proceed with the next couple of slides.
Gary (INSACO Inc.): Hi, everyone! So you might be asking the question, why, ceramics?
Some of you may be in a role where you're a designer or an engineer for your organization. And as a designer, engineer, designing a product you're likely, gonna you know, assess what you're what product you're designing, and what materials would be the best choice.
And I just want to kind of go over the path you may take in determining. You know what material would be a good choice, and why ceramic might be a good choice. So chances are you're going to evaluate, you know material properties when you're trying to make that choice and ceramic will definitely separate itself from other materials, such as metals or plastics. In many of those material property categories. So really, ceramics will separate itself from other materials when it comes to wear resistance high temperature, application.
If, thermal conductivity or electrical conductivity is important, or on the flip side, if it needs to be a thermal or electrical conductor. Excuse me, insulator. You might choose a ceramic. So really, you know, you got to understand, you know, the environment that the product or part is gonna be in. And will the ceramic, you know, withstand those particular environments and extreme conditions ceramic is much, you know, more rare resistance. Wear resistance. As I mentioned. It will definitely last a lot longer in the finished product than other materials. So again, it's just something that, as a designer, you really need to think about and determine, you know, is ceramic going to be the right fit? And then, you know, the next question would be the necessity of post fire ceramic machining.
Okay? So the key here is going to be tolerances, tolerances, tolerances, really. If you think about the process of making ceramic materials, you're going to start with a powder that's going to have a binder, and then you're going to form that into a shape, whether that be a rod, a tube, or a plate. You're going to fire it then and center it, and then it's in its hardest state, which is what we consider the post fired state. So why our tolerance is important. If in your application, the part needs to be very precise, then obviously machining is, gonna be the path that you want to go with machining a company like INSACO, a company like us. We're able to meet these very tight tolerances, which are anywhere, from, you know, a thousandthth of an inch down to, you know, 40 millionths of an inch through all the different machining tools that Scott had mentioned, we're able to meet these very tight tolerances. So if you're designing a part, you're likely going to need to go to a machined part post fired machine part. And the reason for that is, when you're in the centering stage of the product process.
The centering is going to shrink the green body ceramic up to 15 to 20%. So you're going to lose size, you're going to lose your tolerance when you go to do the centering. And therefore, since you've lost your size to then machine it and finish. It is really the way you're going to want to go to meet those tolerances.
I'm going to pass it over to Jackson now.
Jackson (INSACO Inc.): So capabilities so piggybacking off of what Gary had said. The biggest advantage we have with doing post fired ceramic machining is that we are able to hold any geometric feature you may be looking for. And in addition to that, because we're machining everything in a post-fired state, and do not have to worry about concerns like shrinkage. We can also hold parts down to extreme tolerances, not down to plus or minus 2,000, th but down to plus or minus 40 millionths. In many cases there are quite a few parts that we machine in this facility where we're holding tolerances down to one micron or 40 millionths of an inch.
A really common example that we use all the time is a piston sleeve assembly that we manufacture truthfully upwards in the thousands of parts per year.
The O.D. of this piston is mated to the idea of the sleeve within a 2 micron clearance, or 40 80 millionths of an inch.
The benefit of this is, it allows for a very precise pumping action within the unit itself. And then, in addition to that, because we're using a ceramic material. We're able to get a surface that isn't going to wear down over time. So it eliminates any need or concern for having to do maintenance on the part or replace it over the time due to its wear. Yeah. And Scott gave a great example of with that 2 micron clearance. You could hold back air with these piston sleeve assemblies. But that isn't just the only thing we focus on. In addition to that, we also have a lot of capability for doing various geometric features, such as threading, which is really what the basis of this presentation is about.
One thing we have up here in this image is, you have a very variety of external threads, whether it be varying in shapes and sizes, the location of the threads, the pitch or just the geometry of the piece itself. You see, all the way in the bottom left corner there's a part that has a hexagonal structure on the exterior of it, and then also the threads that are on a minor diameter where all this leads into one of the biggest capabilities that we have been chasing for the past since our inception is internal threading. And finally, this is now a capability we can offer.
So what you're seeing right here is a sapphire piece that is being threaded onto a piece of zirconia. One of the biggest things that's important about this is all this was done in a post fired state. In addition to that, as you can see, there isn't any large fractures, or breaking within the material, albeit towards the edges. It is a little chippy. I will say that this is a showpiece for a reason. But the biggest benefit we have now with internal threading is this, allows for a new way to join ceramics. Truthfully. This is something we've been trying to chase since our inception, especially in the past 20 years. We've been trying to aim for this way to join ceramic materials, because that's always been the biggest challenge is, how do you take 2 ceramic pieces? Adhere them together?
There's a lot of variety. There's a variety of ways you can approach it, but each way has its own detriment or benefit. One thing we have right here in the corner of the screen, you'll see, is Scott's holding a zirconia plate that has a threaded insert that's epoxied inside of it. So there is a metal insert that we put in, and that's epoxy, and you can put a screw into the part. The downside is that you need to actually epoxy that threaded insert into the piece.
So that is one way you can join ceramics, whether it be with a metalized insert, or just epoxy them together themselves. In addition to that, there's also metalization and brazing. So you can metalize the exterior of a ceramic part, bake the metalization onto it, and that allows you to create a metal surface that can effectively be welded. Quote unquote into another metallic piece.
Third, there's also another way to join ceramics, such as optical contacting, which involves 2 very flat surfaces, such as these 2 pieces here that adhere together with one another because they're so flat that the surfaces contact to remove any air and actually bond with one another. The strength of that process is not as strong potentially as some of the epoxy or metalization depending on how it is done. But it is also another option.
So those are 3 ways, and the reason that becomes to join ceramics. The reason this is so important with internal threading is the challenge we've always run into is, how can we join these materials together without having to go to any kind of secondary operations, removing any issues where we may run into challenges for epoxying, for example, that epoxy is not going to last as high temperatures as the ceramic material itself, so as that joining component fails. You now have a potential area where your end use within your end. Use assembly. The entire
By making these internal threads out of ceramic, you offer a much more homogeneous and uniform way to adhere these materials together, and everything's done in the post-fired state.
So by doing it this way we can offer now thread sizes that are going from anywhere to an M. 2 to an M. 20. And, as I mentioned, everything's done in a post-fired state. The reason that this is also important is because we don't have to worry about shrinkage. We don't have to worry about any of the challenges that you might encounter when you're doing a standard sintering process.
By doing everything in post-fired we can now control the exact tolerances and dimensions of the part because it's not going to change. Once we go to machine that feature in the size, the part is final. There's not something we have to worry about, and that allows us to hold much more stringent tolerances and achieve a new way to join these materials together in the past, that we have been experimenting with this, and it's always been a very challenging thing to do, because ceramic materials are so hard and so brittle you have to machine them with various forms of diamond grinding, which is how we perform all of the machining here at our facility, whether it be fixed or free, abrasive.
That in turn now allows us to utilizing our capability and this new technique achieve this, these kind of finishes that we've been struggling to have before. So with that said wanted to just give you a brief overview of what that is, and turn this over to questions. I could bore you to death with about 50 slides, just commenting on threads themselves. But I think it's gonna be better if we flip this over to you guys, ask for any questions from the crowd and allow us to get into a little bit more of an in-depth discussion rather than just hit you with 50 different slides of information, and have it be a little too overwhelming. So with that said, I'll turn it over to you. If you have any questions, please feel free to shoot them our way.
Jake Kauffman: Well, thank you so much, gentlemen, we do have a few questions that have come in. I appreciate your time and expertise so far today, but we do have a question from the gallery. They want to know what sort of materials can be threaded.
INSACO: From a ceramic perspective, any material that we machine can be threaded now in front of me, and we have very small pieces here, but we have a piece of silicon carbide with the M. 2 thread, and again in our presentation we talked about M. 2 to M. 20, but there's also English equivalents.
We have sapphire, we have 0 door, we have zirconia, the the 2 materials which we have not attempted yet, and I shudder. One would be boron carbide and the other one would be silicon nitride. Now, boron carbide is very difficult to machine.
If someone would ask, we would probably experiment with it. If Silicon Nitride has a lot of different constituents, making it very hard depending on if it's hip depending on its constituents and other materials as to how it has been formed, so I would expect to have success in the silicon nitride, at least specific silicon nitrides, boron carbide. I wouldn't know. But you know, glasses, I like to say aluminous is zirconia. So a to Z. And again, we don't do metals. We don't do plastic. So alumina, zirconia silicon carbide potentially silicon nitride and obviously sapphire. Those are all, and aluminum oxide, aluminum nitride. Those are all materials which will be able to be internally threaded actually piggybacking off of that and going back to the slides. This is an example of a sapphire piece with the zirconia screw.
So you have a piece of sapphire on the exterior that is internally threaded, and a zirconia screw that's present right there. It's actually what we have currently tiny little piece. Unfortunately, it's an M 2 thread. So it's pretty tiny and trying to show that on camera is a little challenging.
Jake Kauffman: Definitely awesome so also have a question about what is the quality of an internal thread.
INSACO: So the this is a relatively new capability and threading has a a lot of standards and tolerances. I would say that it will accept the thread. But if you would say it's a UN fine or a UN course, I forget what UN stands for exactly, but I would say that the quality of the thread is that it will accept the screw. But I wouldn't say that it's going to have a high precision accuracy on number of threads per inch, or locational accuracy on the how many rotations equals a specific distance. Nor would I also be concerned. These are brittle materials, and so chipping is an issue as Jackson had alluded to, and what I would say is, the there's going to be chips on occasion, you know. Certainly we could try to minimize that. But because these materials are brittle, I would expect that there's going to be a necessity for some level of accept accepting parts with chips.
Jake Kauffman: Awesome. And yeah, anyone who has questions can ask them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen, Danny would like to know, for the internal threads. What's the strength? Comparison to other materials, such as steel.
INSACO: So I would say that unfortunately it is not going to be as hard. The challenge you run into is that ceramic materials are, as Scott mentioned, brittle, but especially brittle when it comes to being under tension. A good example I can give to kind of just paint a decent picture here is. Think of a skyscraper and the concrete that's going into it. You can build a skyscraper with various, with concrete that's reinforced. But still the entire concrete in that structure is being held under compression for the majority of its time.
However, in feats of strength, you can witness people taking concrete cinder blocks and pulling them apart. The concrete in that skyscraper is under compression, whereas, pulling that cinder block apart in a feet of strength is done under tension. The challenge you're going to run into with joining these materials is that as soon as you start to pull on those threads, you're going to potentially run the risk of them fracturing. I would not say it's going to hold as tight as a steel thread.
However, it's going to be reasonable is the best way I can say it's not going to be something where, if I lean on this or pull on it, it's gonna snap. It's not that brittle. We use the term brittle relative to the more technical material side of things. Whereas, like you said Steel you're not going to measure steel within the realm of okay, how is this going to compare to a piece of wood in terms of its strength we're talking about when we're trying to push the extremes for these limitations. What does that look like? And that's where there's a little bit of a limitation with the threading process, because the part can only handle so much tensile forces, especially when you're going to be pulling the threads, which are some pretty small tines, regardless of whatever size you're using.
Jake Kauffman: Awesome. So then, also, Jeff in the audience wants to know, wouldn't this make it overly fragile? What kind of torque aspect is used for fastening.
INSACO: Again, we agree. We agree completely. I have a piece here that is just a screw on top of a quartz piece, and if I took this and went to, you know, a a relatively high torque. We're going to break it. I know that we're going to break it so I wouldn't think of these pieces and this capability as being a capability which is going to allow for a high strength.
But if it's a high temperature, application, or in the case of this piece, this is joining of 2 pieces in a butt ending. So here's a piece of quartz, and here's another piece of quartz, and we could butt end them together in order to make a longer tube.
What we're trying to do is identify that we have this capability. But from the design aspect it comes down to the customer as to what they're trying to do with the understanding. With these materials being as brittle as they are. As Jackson had said, they're wonderful in compression. They're terrible in tension, and that is going to be expected with regards to the end use applications and actually to piggyback off of Scott's comment, and furthering with what you're saying when machining these threads, we need to follow the Unc. Or unf guidelines or unef guidelines. We can't do anything with an npt thread. So national pipe threads, because the problem with those threads is that requires a large amount of torque to be put on the threads to ensure that you are putting the pieces under tension and stressing the actual thread itself to ensure a sealed face.
Because these materials are so poor in attention, you're not going to be able to form an npt thread. However, this offers a way to join the materials together for high temperature environments or caustic or corrosive environments. One of the things that is really good with ceramics and that they're excellent at is being inert. So you can go to some really extreme environments that would ordinarily degrade metal material very fast.
But instead, now you can use a ceramic piece that will hold these components together, and at least offer a new way to withstand that specific environment. So it's more about a creative solution for approaching some very niche or challenging areas as opposed to saying, Hey, this is going to replace a structural component I'm already using out of metal.
Jake Kauffman: Thank you. Jackson and Scott. We also have a question from Wesley talking about how they machine piazzo ceramic with diamond boring tools. They only do core drilling of Od, id, and face. What tooling would your company suggest using, since you deal so much with ceramics.
INSACO: Oh, we're using the same. No, I mean, we're so we're using typically diamond fixed abrasives, diamond tools, wheels, loose abrasives, slurries. Various other, you know, custom tooling. But primarily we're using diamond because diamond is harder than even the hardest of ceramics. So you're able to machine all the features that you need using diamond tools. Yeah, you're pretty much right on the right track. That's exactly the way we'd be approaching. This is just using various diamond tools and one of the other things that's really critical about our capability Scott had touched, based on this earlier is we have over 300 machines and machine tools.
Each machine is going to vary at excelling in its own unique way to machine the part we have a CNC grinder or universal grinder that's going to be excellent at doing outer diameter shapes, whereas, like you're talking about trying to drill an O.D. or an I.D. bore in something is going to be much better suited for a VMC. Which is going to excel at that machining step.
So what you're doing is exactly the way we'd be approaching this. And truthfully, it's just having a variety of tools at our disposal that allows us to do these unique geometries.
Jake Kauffman: Awesome. So we do have a few more questions coming in. What should I do if I have an application but in, but am unsure of the ceramic material being used, or its general design.
INSACO: Yeah, so give us a call. Send us an email. We have a sales email account, where you can send an inquiry in to sales@insico.com. You can give us a call, typically a lot of new applications that come in. Start with just a conversation, you know. Even if you don't have a drawing at this point, we're more than happy to discuss the application. Discuss material selection. We don't actually make ceramic material here we buy it commercially available from material ceramic producers. But we'll take an unbiased approach to material selection. We'll give you our guidance. The best that we can. You know we have a lot of years of experience to pull on in order to help guide you in the in the right direction when it comes to a material selection. But, as I mentioned in some of the earlier slides, you know, a lot of it is dependent on the environment, or what the part or application or product is going to see to determine. You know which properties are important. Just to mention on our website. We do have a designer's guide, which is a nice tool that you can utilize to really sort out the materials based on their property values. So that would be another resource to start and and take a look at that. But honestly, we like to jump on the phone and talk about different applications and in different industries will really sell product into any industry. It doesn't really matter if a ceramic part is required or necessary, then we're, you know we're willing to help the one. Obviously, I've been here for a while, and the one axiom that I like to say is, you do not choose these materials because you want them.
You choose them because you have to have them, because the end use application does not allow for any other material. And again, that's based on temperature. It's based on where.
And fundamentally, they're always going to be more expensive than metal and obviously plastic. So, but they're the only other material that you could potentially use is unobtainium. And that's another axiom. But basically it's a material which is not obtainable. So we have to use the ceramic or sapphire, or glass, or whatever it is for the end, use, application, and in order to achieve success in the end, use.
Jake Kauffman: So it looks like we do have time for a few last questions going back to the internal threading. Are there any limitations.
INSACO: That's a good question, I would say. Certainly we just don't know where they are. We're working through some of that as we get into more and more parts or projects that involve internal threading. Sorry to cut you off, but it is a work in progress.
You know we haven't been doing it forever for forever. But, we're kind of learning as we go. So if you have an inquiry or a need for an internal thread. Then we would want to sit down and discuss. You know. How's it going to be used? What's it going to be exposed to? What your end goal is. And then we can look to achieve what you need. But yeah, I mean, there's limitations. But we haven't really experienced many of those yet, and I'm sure we will and and overcome those limitations and hurdles. But it's just time will tell.
Jake Kauffman: Well, thank you, Gary, and also looks like we can start wrapping things up today. So a massive thank you to everyone over at INSACO, and obviously a massive thank you to Scott, Middle Gary, Leatherman, and Jackson Evans for your time and expertise today, gentlemen, thank you so much. And I hope you guys have a great rest of your day.
INSACO: Thank you. Take care, everyone
Jake Kauffman: Awesome. Thank you. Guys have a great one.
INSACO Thank you very much.
GIE Media transcripts are created quickly. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of GIE Media's webinar is the recording.
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