Forest City Gear has begun operations in a new state-of-the-art facility designed to greatly improve lead times and quality for the production of precision gear blanks. This new division of Forest City Gear, called Roscoe Works and dedicated solely to the production of precision turning, operates from its own highly productive new 8,500 sq. ft. facility in close proximity to Forest City Gear’s main facility in Roscoe, IL. That’s very good news for Forest City Gear customers, says Roscoe Works General Manager Larry Cass. “Roscoe works gives us complete control over the quality and delivery of the blanks (and slugs) that are the ‘near net shape’ starting point for many of the gears we produce,” Cass says. “The types of projects we take on here at Forest City Gear for customers around the world have never been more demanding from a quality and delivery standpoint. If we start off a project with turned blanks out of tolerance, or waiting for blanks from a supplier, this can ultimately create a devastating production bottleneck in our KanBan system where operations upstream are sitting idle waiting for product to arrive."

According to Cass, the new facility easily meets current capacity requirements, and gives the company much additional room to grow. For example, a new Hardinge Quest RS 51 MSY (Super Precision) Turning Center with 16 station turret, sub-spindle, and live tooling with C-Axis and Y-Axis gives Roscoe Works the ability to completely machine blanks and slugs in a single setup that includes all turning, milling and drilling operations. For faster production of larger blanks (up to 6” in diameter), Roscoe Works has installed a new Takisawa TT200G Twin Turret, Twin Spindle Turning Center. This machine can perform simultaneous turning of either identical, or first and second operations, simultaneously on twin spindles. A new Tsugami Swiss-Style Lathe and an Okuma CNC Vertical Lathe will soon replace two older machines and add still more capacity.