Business Profile: Echo Hill Automation

Like many technology invention stories, this one begins in the garage. Brothers Harry and Dan Schellenberg grew up around Beamsville, Ontario in the southeast tip of the province—wine country. Both brothers are mechanical engineers with a knack for tinkering and fixing things, so 20 years ago they started a business doing design work and operating a small machine shop in their Mom’s garage. Their main projects involved working for area machine shops, a lot of machine tool rebuilds including adding automation, specialty handling machines, and integrating servo motors to old machines.

A lot of their time was spent reconditioning centerless grinders, automating technology that was built years ago for manual operation. They custom designed loading systems for these machines, but they knew there was more that could be done to improve productivity. So the brothers opened up their notebook and took a clean sheet approach to the design of the centerless grinding machine.

In 2009 the first prototype of their new design was built and running, and in the spring of 2011 they sold their first machine. This year they have nine machines slated to be installed, accounting for 20 machines sold and counting. Harry Schellenberg estimates that roughly 150 million parts have been ground on their centerless grinding technology so far.

The Schellenberg’s company, Echo Hill Automation, no longer works out of a garage. They’ve been in their 14,000 sq. ft. Beamsville facility for 10 years where all of the machines are manufactured and assembled. “We do almost everything in house,” says Harry. The nine-person company operates a complete machine shop including a recently-installed Milltronics vertical machining center purchased from Mitcham Machine Tools along with additional machining centers to create parts, wire EDM and waterjet for cutting, and welding is done in-house. The castings for the frames of the 12,000-lb. machines are done in nearby Brantford, and the bending of the machine’s exterior sheet metal housings are sent out to a local shop.

Called the Tactic 8 (Tactic stands for: total automatic compensation through integrated control), the Echo Hill centerless grinder is a turnkey CNC-driven system that has automation built into most every function of the process.

Beyond the grinding operation at the heart of the machine, the Tactic 8 has an integrated handling system for feeding and removing parts. The servo-driven loading/unloading system is also capable of handling multiple parts at once, a productivity enhancer. On the back-end the system has an in-line Keyence optical micrometer taking 1,000 reading per second. This inline gauging ties back into the system’s controller, so any variance detected can be addressed by the machine without any operator involvement.

The system’s Beckhoff controller is the brains of the operation, integrating all of the functions. According to Armando Afonso, technical sales manager with Echo Hill, the intelligent controller in the machine is like “basically having a built-in operator.”

The grinder’s set-up assistant allows for operators with very little grinding experience. The machine can be set up to run lights-out.

The most unique feature on the Tactic 8 is the positioning of the motors driving the grinding and regulating wheels. The patented “powered from above” design places the linear motors on an overhead roller rail system. Both the grinding and the regulating wheel move, and the control of the linear motors keeps the accuracy high. The cast iron frame filled with a polymer concrete base also dampens any vibration. According to Schellenberg the machine can hold a plus/minus 2-micron tolerance. Another benefit of the overhead motors is it keeps the motors clean, as coolant and debris flow down through the system.

Also, because both wheels are on rails, their machine dresses the grinding and regulating wheels in the center, along the same contact line as the part. And because of the tight tolerance and gauging system tied into a feedback loop with the controller, the machine can run multiple parts at once across its 8-inch grinding wheel width.

Before automation, traditional centerless grinders required many hours for set up. And while the centerless grinding process is best suited to high-volume applications, because of the fast set up time on Echo Hill’s machine it makes smaller batch runs more economical.

[gallery type="slideshow" link="none" size="large" ids="110336,110337"]

“In the past, shops would have up to 12 grinders set up,” explains Harry. “They would be dedicated to specific parts. Shops would run one for a day, and then it would sit idle because they didn’t want to have to change it over.”

“We built a system that’s flexible, so that you can change it over more easily,” says Harry. “We have companies running 10 or 12 different jobs on one grinder. And these are high-volume runs, because they can run up to four parts at a time.”

Most of Echo Hill’s centerless grinding machines are going into the U.S. Repeat orders are a great endorsement, and Echo Hill has one customer who has confirmed an order for his eighth machine.

Once companies install machines, Echo Hill also supplies tooling packages to set up the grinders for a particular part. The packages include the work rest blade suited to the part, a software program for dressing the profile into the grinding and regulating wheels, and tooling for the handling system including grippers. Depending on the complexity of the part, packages are put together in a few weeks. Harry says they’ve supplied about 100 different tooling kits to accommodate about 100 different parts.

The company has sold to companies for a variety of applications from automotive, to aerospace and it’s making inroads in the bearings industry, anywhere parts require precision grinding for high tolerance and roundness.

Schellenberg says that centerless grinding is widely used across North America. He estimates there may be some 13,000 machines in operation on the continent, but the technology on most of those shop floors has been around for decades. The systems Echo Hill Automation is building today are a far cry from the manual grinders Harry and Dan had been refurbishing for clients in their Mom’s garage. Their home-grown innovations, digitizing and automating the process, are playing role in modernizing the art of centerless grinding.