Design and analysis of drilling head for steering linkage parts in automobile industry

Abstract

The continuous efforts are been put in by production engineers and process planning engineers to reduce or maintain minimum manufacturing lead time. The existing radial drilling machine took 184 s for grooving six-holes in the tie rod. The operator has produced the six grooves by repositioning the tie rod in the fixture. The total machining time required for completing one tie rod is 184 s out of which 138 s were machining time and the remaining 46 s was material handling time. In the present work design and fabrication of multi-spindle drilling, the head is fabricated to increase the production capacity of the manufacturing unit. The other merits of this design are quality and quantity products by minimizing operator fatigue. The methodology followed to accomplish the work included the concept development process and modeling. Design calculations and finite element analysis were carried out on the critical part such as gear and gear on the shaft for design validation. The unit was fabricated in-house and it was installed in the existing radial machine. The new machining time is 40 s out of which 30 s is machining time and 10 s was the machine handling time. This was achieved by the incorporation of the newly designed machine tool and the production rate was increased by 78%.