Six hours later, the parts emerge with precise grooves, tracks, threaded bolt holes, and other shapes carved into them. Two workers operate a crane to load castings onto the machining system. There’s so little noise that people can converse without raising their voices.
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The air is almost odorless and free of dust, an enemy of precision and a safety hazard as well. Inside the plant, steel-reinforced floors are 40 inches thick to prevent vibrations. Now the laboratory uses the factory to test next-generation prototypes.
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The laboratory’s engineers also helped design and set up the factory itself, inventing fixtures for use in product assembly and developing software for the automated lines. One smartphone app they designed enables customers to monitor their machines, displaying red, yellow, and green lights next to tiny images of the devices to show their operating status. With more than 60 engineers, the center designs machine tools and software for DMG Mori worldwide. One reason for placing the factory on the same site was to capitalize on this talent, Hansel says. “This high-value manufacturing of sophisticated technology is an opportunity for us in this country.” “For this combination of software, hardware, and precision manufacturing, companies need proximity to educational infrastructure,” says Enrique Lavernia, the dean of the Davis engineering school. Piner and the factory’s managing director, Adam Hansel, were completing graduate degrees when they were hired as two of the first four employees.
The company established its Digital Technology Laboratory in Davis in 2000. The factory grew out of a relationship between the company and the engineering school at the University of California, Davis, according to Zachary Piner, general manager of the plant’s technology department. A map in the assembly hall sprouts tiny white, yellow, navy, and orange flags representing the products’ destinations. Flatbed trucks carrying its 20,000-to-40,000-pound products can take the road west to Silicon Valley or east to auto, aircraft, and oilfield-equipment factories. The tidy white-and-gray DMG Mori plant sits unobtrusively next to Interstate 80. The United States now accounts for 25 percent of DMG Mori’s global sales. Building some of its machines in the United States also insulates the company from losses on currency exchange and has helped to improve its sales, profits, and share of the U.S. As automation makes labor costs less important, producers of everything from smartphones to artificial knees to electric cars are increasingly able to choose local production, he says.Īmong the key advantages of locating in California: the factory is closer to customers-not trivial when shipping products that weigh tens of thousands of pounds-and to the company’s innovation center and local university research partners. The quality and productivity of the Davis machines put them “at the upper end of the industry,” says David Dornfeld, chair of the mechanical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley.ĭMG Mori’s decision to build the $50 million factory in Davis says important things about the future of U.S. Manufacturers can use DMG Mori tools to make more products, make them faster, and use less energy over longer periods of time. Fast, durable, and accurate to the micrometer, they are able to move both the cutting devices and the parts they’re shaping in multiple directions. The Davis factory builds some of the most advanced computer-numeric-controlled (CNC) milling machines in the world. 14ĭays needed to make a DMG Mori Seiki milling machine The results include molds for die casting, gears for transmissions, and cases for smartphones. Also known as milling machines, they use spinning tools to carve complex shapes out of roughly cast pieces of metal. The Japanese call them “mother machines,” because they make other machines possible. There, 40 workers build bedroom-size machines by hand, assembling 2,000 parts to create the computer-driven instruments that will form the hearts of auto, aircraft, and electronics factories across America.
This is the plant’s automated half, but on the other side of a wall with windows, assembly lines swarm with people in white helmets and navy uniforms. It’s the kind of almost-deserted vista you would expect in advanced manufacturing. Three rows of towering, growling machines carve out precision components from rough metal castings weighing anywhere from a few pounds to a few tons. Surrounded by looming robotic equipment, he’s the only human in sight at DMG Mori Seiki’s gleaming machine-tool plant in Northern California.
A factory worker drives a forklift carrying a four-ton metal casting across a polished concrete floor.
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