The Oregon Manufacturing Innovation Center Research and Development (OMIC R&D) continues to grow a strong membership base with the addition this month of HAIMER, a world market leading German tooling company in the field of tool holding, shrinking, balancing and presetting. The partnership between The Boeing Company and HAIMER Group will be strategically expanded to a joint membership at the OMIC R&D institution.
Through this partnership, Boeing — with its center of excellence and main production plant for heavy metal machining in Portland, Oregon — is intensifying its strategic partnership with HAIMER by sponsoring a joint membership at OMIC R&D. The partnership between Boeing and Haimer reaches back more than 10 years when HAIMER’s Safe-Lock™ pull out protection system became a true game changer at Boeing. With one of the largest titanium machining shops in the world, Boeing Portland has set the standard for cutting tools and tool holder applications for difficult to machine materials. Due to its technology advantages, the Haimer Safe-Lock™ system has become the Boeing Portland standard for roughing in their milling operations. Haimer implemented an open licensing policy where additional American and other cutting tool makers offer this technology as a standard solution which are widely used in the Boeing machining operations. In fact, the Boeing Company has also received an IP, patent and trade mark license from Haimer to be able to quickly respond to their machining needs for this innovative technology.
Prior to implementing Safe-Lock™ in their production, Boeing was constantly facing the challenge of preventing the cutting tool from pull-out which potentially created very expensive scrap. Over the last 10 years, since implementing Safe-Lock™, they haven’t had a single tool pullout incident for their high value components – thus avoiding any sort of expensive scrap and machining failure which was a common problem before implementing Safe-Lock™.
