Forging Solution Delivers Off-Highway Fabrication Savings

Off-Highway Forging Innovation

Situation

When one of America’s leading manufacturers of off-highway equipment sought a new forging option for their excavator ripper arm, they turned to Presrite’s engineering team for a cost-effective solution.

Originally, the off-highway customer used three forgings that they had to take back to their facility and weld together to assemble the ripper arm. This technique required them to buy additional tube steel and spend a significant amount of time and labor to complete the weldings. Unfortunately, in addition to the time that it took to do the welding, the welded components were prone to breakage during heavy excavation, such as road construction.

The customer required a new forging solution to:

• Reduce the materials required to assemble the multiple forgings
• Save time and labor required to weld the forgings together
• Provide long-term durability for heavy equipment performance

Solution

Presrite’s engineering team consulted with the customer to review the ripper arm design to see if they could use a combined design approach to create the arm as a single forging with a high-precision press.

Using CAD and SolidWorks 3D simulation at Presrite’s Technical Center, the team:

• Conducted real-world simulations of the new forging process
• Ran performance tests to determine pressure and fatigue limitations
• Created a single forging prototype for the customer to test at their facility

The customer determined that the new forging prototype not only met their industry specifications, but increased the strength of the ripper arm tenfold.

Results

Thanks to the success of the ripper arm forging solution, the customer partnered with Presrite to create multiple arm variations in different sizes and specifications. The new forging solution saved the customer almost 70% from the original production, adding up to thousands in overall cost savings.

The single ripper arm forging now delivers bottom-line benefits such as:

• Eliminating material and assembly costs associated with welding
• Freeing up skilled labor for more value-adding manufacturing tasks
• Enabling the customer to focus less on forging engineering, so they can focus on their customers