Since our goal is to provide you with excellence in all respects, then we must be willing to live in your problems and respond to challenges for innovative solutions and improvements.

We have successfully achieved this in a number of examples:

Example 1: Make lemonade from lemons.

When machines are created by machine designers, they don't always come out perfect. In this case, seal leakage was a huge problem, not so much that it was chronic, but when the seals inevitably failed due to vibration and age, they were located in such places as to be practically inaccessible. The whole machine had to literally be dismantled in order to reach the bad seal, and this could take at least a shift or two of lost production.

The worst part of this problem was that since the seal replacement was so hard to do, the tendency was to keep the machine up and feed it a lot of hydraulic fluid. The hydraulic fluid then leaked into the metal working fluid sump, diluting a very expensive, high performance metal working fluid. When a certain level of hydraulic fluid built up in the sump, machine speed and part quality was severely degraded.

The Sunbelt solution was to design a metal working fluid and a hydraulic fluid such that as they came together in the metal working sump, they synergized and the sump fluid got better. In this manner, continual leakage, while still a problem of cost, did not compromise production or part quality. In fact, it just added a higher level of forgiveness to an already good situation. The Sunbelt products involved were BriteGrind 820G and SpanRay 89-M.

Example Number 2: Build in the performance.

A customer had been using Sunbelt SemiSpan 4287, a semi-synthetic coolant, in CNC machining of various aerospace alloys. For many years, the shop had purchased separately drums of tapping fluid. The machinists would occasionally put a shot of tapping fluid on the CNC tools for tapping or other tough jobs. Eventually, several drums of tapping fluid per month were being consumed in this way. The tapping fluid was very expensive, and it also was an excellent source of nutrition for biologicals which would attack the coolant.

The Sunbelt solution was to specially design a coolant with all of the tapping/tooling performance built in, so the need to add tapping fluid to the coolant was eliminated. A large source of bug food was also eliminated, along with an inventory requirement for tapping fluid. Ultrisol 828-R is recommended for the tough CNC machining and tapping jobs.

Example Number 3: Eliminate a step.

A customer had been using a competitive soluble oil coolant to produce galvanized tubing. After the tubing was made, it was sprayed with a separate rust inhibiting product to protect the parts during shipment. It was a challenge for the customer to maintain consistent coverage with the additional rust inhibitor at line speeds. There were frequent lapses, despite everyone's best effort.

The Sunbelt solution is Raysol 4262, an emulsion made for use on galvanized metals. It contains such a potent dose of corrosion inhibitor that the residual film it leaves on the galvanized protects it for several months of outdoor storage, with no white rust stains occurring on the parts. The entire step of applying the extra rust inhibitor was eliminated, along with the cost and inventory requirement of it.

These are just a few examples of how we can put innovation and excellence together to provide a win-win solution.

Let us know if you have a situation you would like us to take a look at.