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Warsaw Report
Medical-related finishing holding up In A Tough Economy
By Jim Destefani, Editor
Electropolishing
is an electrochemical process that is almost the opposite of plating.
While plating deposits metal on a surface, electropolishing smoothes
and polishes the surfaces of metal parts by the controlled removal of
microscopic amounts of material.
Frequently used for components
that must have a very smooth and lustrous finish, such as surgical
instruments, the process is most often applied to stainless steels,
especially the commonly used 300- and 400-series materials. It can be
controlled to remove metal within ±0.0001 inch and— depending on
process time, temperature, current, bath composition and part surface
condition before processing—can produce a range of finishes from satin
to mirror bright.
None of this is news to Earl Kline, president
of Warsaw Electropolishing (Warsaw, IN). Kline has worked in the
finishing industry for more than 36 years, first at a plating shop and
then in his own business since 1992.
“Having worked at a
plating shop for 23 years before starting my own company, I was
familiar with the ‘feast or famine’ aspect of the business,” Kline
says. “And that’s what we see here. There are very few times that
things are just going along at an ideal pace.”
The Medical Market
One
thing that helps mitigate the ups and downs of the metal finishing
business for Warsaw Electropolishing is its location in the hub of
orthopedic implant technology. The small northern Indiana town is home
to companies that control the vast majority of the market for
artificial hips, knees and other orthopedic devices. While not entirely
immune from the current downturn, Warsaw Electropolishing’s
medical-related business is still relatively steady compared with other
industry segments the company serves, according to Kline.
“About
60% of our business is medical-related,” he says. “We do work directly
for some of the big implant companies. We also do work for suppliers
who make parts for them.”
Process Offerings
As the company
name implies, Warsaw Electropolishing has found its niche in non-plated
electrochemical surface treatments for stainless steels and titanium
alloys. “We do strictly electropolishing and passivating,” Kline says.
“The electropolishing part of the business is only for stainless
steels. We also passivate some titanium and stainless using nitric and
citric acid passivation.”
Most of the medical components the
company processes are surgical tools and toolholders. “We electropolish
drill bits, rasps and other tools that have contact with the bone
during surgery,” Kline explains.
Being a family-owned shop—son
Duane is the company’s production manager—Warsaw Electropolishing’s
jobs tend toward relatively low-volume specialty work as opposed to
high-volume jobs. “Lot sizes vary quite a bit, but the average job is
probably in the 100–125 piece range,” Kline says.
According to
Kline, his company’s medical customers are looking for a couple of
benefits from electropolishing. “The parts we process are either to
size or for appearance,” he says. “Sometimes the customer has an
oversize part and wants the part taken down to a certain size. That’s
pretty straightforward. You just have to make sure you don’t take the
parts out of spec.
“The other main thing is appearance,” he
continues. “Surface finish is not such a big deal for many jobs,
although sometimes it is important.
“It’s often called out on
the blueprint, but sometimes the requirement doesn’t really correspond
to any function of the part. So we talk with customers about what they
really expect in terms of surface finish.”
Part surface finish
after electropolishing also depends on the condition of parts when they
come in, Kline says. “If the surface finish of as-received parts is
around 20 μin Ra, electropolishing should improve it. But if it’s more
like 1 or 2 μin Ra, electropolishing may actually increase it.
“The
bottom line is, there just aren’t a lot of written specifications for
electropolishing. So we talk with customers to see what they’re really
expecting from our process.” When surface finish is important, Warsaw
Electropolishing uses an optical comparator to visually check parts, he
adds.
According to Kline, the passivation part of his company’s
business is a bit more clear cut, at least in terms of specifications.
“There are all kinds of specs for passivating,” he says. “We run jobs
to various general industrial specs—AES, ASTM and AMS-QQ-P—and to
customer specifications, which are usually pretty explicit about what
they’resteps need to be followed.
The company’s titanium
passivation experience consists of processing commercially pure
titanium and a couple of aluminum-vanadium alloys most commonly
associated with aerospace applications. But nearly all the titanium
parts are for medical applications, Kline says.
The EP Process
The
electropolishing portion of Warsaw Electropolishing’s work consists
mainly of processing 300- and 400-series stainless materials and
cobalt-chrome alloys. Kline says the specific alloy being
electropolished makes a difference in processing and handling. “The
300-series stainless steels are relatively forgiving, while some of the
400-series materials are very sensitive to, for example, being left in
the tank with no current applied,” he says. “Some sensitive materials,
you can’t even keep them in the rinse water too long.”
Warsaw
Electropolishing generates a routing sheet detailing all needed process
steps and processing conditions for every job. “The first time a job
comes in, especially if there’s a visual aspect to it, we develop a
process to make sure the customer gets what they want,” Kline says.
“When the job comes in again, we can pull up the router and follow the
procedure through the shop.”
Being
precision components bound for use in operating rooms around the world,
practically every medical part at Warsaw Electropolishing is subjected
to an aqueous ultrasonic cleaning process and spray rinsing. Depending
on the material, some parts are also dried before heading to the
electropolishing tanks.
“After electropolishing we rinse, and
some parts require immersion in nitric acid or another solution after
electropolishing,” Kline explains. “If parts need passivation we do
that, then check the components to specifications before packing and
shipping.”
Temperature in the electropolishing tank is 145°F,
and parts remain in the tank for a few seconds to a few minutes
depending on size and specifications. The company mixes its own
proprietary blend of electropolishing chemicals. “By doing that
ourselves, we know exactly what’s in it, and we’ve had pretty good
success with that approach,” Kline explains.
For racking, the
company usually buys rack components and assembles them in-house.
“Occasionally we have a special rack made, but practically all our jobs
can be run using a ready-made rack or a rack made with components we
purchase,” Kline says.
Some of the jobs in the shop on this day
include a vibratory bowl for part handling and orientation, surgical
drill bits less than ¼ inch in diameter and stainless steel exhaust
pipes for marine engines.
“We run quite a few of the bowls, and
some of them are 18–24 inches in diameter,” Kline says. “That’s another
segment of our business that’s going pretty well right now—vibratory
bowls for pharmaceutical or food processing equipment.
Drill
bits are produced from Type 316 stainless steel. “For the drill bits,
the flutes and other parts of the drill need to be nice and clean,” he
continues. “Electropolishing is really a good way to clean parts.”
Warsaw
Electropolishing also processes several sizes and configurations of the
exhaust pipes, which are first electropolished and then passivated.
Quality and Environmental Control
Warsaw
Electropolishing is in the midst of preparing for ISO 9001
registration, so the company is busy documenting its processes and
procedures. For electropolishing process control, workers monitor bath
temperature and concentration on a regular basis—a least daily—and make
required additions on a regular schedule.
Shop workers also
wear plastic gloves when handling parts to avoid fingerprinting. “If
customers are visiting, they can handle their own parts without gloves,
but even then we’ve sometimes told them to stop,” Kline says. “We just
don’t want a fingerprint to be part of a problem, and if there are
fingerprints on a part they’re not ours.”
After processing,
parts are inspected visually and using standard calipers and
micrometers to verify dimensions. “We try not to make inspection more
complicated than it needs to be,” Kline says. “We generally work to
tolerances in the thousandths, but some jobs require tolerances within
a couple ten-thousandths.”
Some customers visit the shop to
perform quality audits and others send in a third-party auditor, Kline
explains. “And, every medical job requires a certification that tells
them exactly what we did and how we did it,” he adds. “Our customers
keep those on file so that when they’re audited for ISO or by one of
their customers, they have that documentation.”
On the
environmental front, the company discharges no wastewater. “With
multiple counterflowed rinses, we keep water use to a minimum,” Kline
says. “The final rinse is deionized water, and since it’s counterflowed
all the other rinse water comes from that. Eventually we neutralize and
evaporate the water, and what’s left is hauled away a couple times a
year."
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