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One of the things that Timken has focused on historically has been the bearing world, but over the last 10 years they've made an aggressive pursuit to really invest in mechanical power transmission.
That's why we're here in terms of Timken recognizing drives as a North American manufacturer of precision roller chain, high quality tier one product, and we fit very nicely in their portfolio of product.
Drives does an excellent job in servicing food and beverage, agriculture, mining, oil and gas, and general industrial.
In this facility that you're in right now it basically has expanded about six times over the years to the point where we're now over 400,000 square foot and doing very well.
The raw steel that comes in the building we receive that from local steel mills and it's slit to the proper width for our specifications and our process.
The steel comes in from vendors which are all approved vendors where we've visited their facilities, we've looked at their quality systems and how they're producing to ensure that they have the capability to make consistent quality product.
The punch press department starts our process.
We have several high-speed presses, they all run progressive dies, so we're able to blank the part out of the steel, we're able to put the pitch holes in.
The pitch hole of the chain is really the cornerstone of the quality.
We use a process that actually works the hole three times.
So we pierce the hole, we shave the hole to make it straighter, and then the last step we drift the hole to make it round.
We do two types of heat treating.
Through hardening just gives you a constant hardness throughout the part.
Case carburizing gives you that hard shell around the outside of the part so that's ideal for wear components.
We have the latest state-of-the-art equipment in order to check the in our laboratories.
We're able to check material grade, we're able to check heat treated parts for case depth, for hardness, for microstructure.
We're able to check the tensile strength of the chain, we're able to measure the length of the chain as we produce them, so we're able to check all of the specifications right here in this building.
There's one step before assembly where we shot peen the link plates and the rollers and we vibratory deburr the other parts to make sure they're smooth, you know, they're clean, ready for assembly.
Small pitch precision roller chain is manufactured in automated assemblers where all five components are introduced to the assembly machine and the assembly machine puts the chain together.
There's vision systems and other sensors to make sure that all the components are present.
The chain is riveted, staked, the pin ends are riveted or swaged.
So after the chain is assembled the final step in our manufacturing process is hot dip lubrication.
So that's vital for the chain life.
Without that hot dip lubrication the chain would not perform.
We figure that lubrication is probably the best lube that the chain's ever going to see even with good maintenance practices.
Depending on what the customer needs or wants, we're able to put chains on large reels, we're able to put chains in custom crates, we're able to orient the chain the way that best suits the customer so that when they receive it, A, they can get it out of the box easiest and B, it fits where they need it to go in order to put it in the machine.
Our relationship with Motion is critical and the partnership works because they're focused on tier one support of high quality manufacturers to provide the best possible solutions to their customers.
You know we've been in business for 60 years over that course of time.
You know as we maintain the equipment there are opportunities where we'll need to research parts that we need to keep presses running, keep things flowing so that we can service our customers.
Motion is a very valuable relationship for us in that they do a lot of that research to help us find the right parts the first time so that when we go to fix those pieces of equipment that reliability is there, the parts going to be here, and it's going to be the part that we need to keep those machines running in tip-top condition. you