Braking with Tradition
Story and photos by Scott Rathburn
From CNC Machining Magazine, Winter 2001

Page 2 of 3

	Dan Beaudin sets up to machine another punch out  of 4140 HT alloy steel for a set of disc brake tooling

“The way original equipment manufacturers now make brake pads,” Norm explains, “is much more complex, and obviously more costly, than, say, 20 years ago. Typically, the tooling is purchased from outside suppliers. We had started going this direction at Allied Signal, and each set of tooling was costing us about $10,000, and we would wait six to eight weeks for delivery of one part number. Well, in the aftermarket, there are five or six hundred part numbers that are active, and it doesn’t take too much math to say, ‘Hey, if I’m going to have 500 part numbers, and it’s $10,000 a hit, and each one takes six to eight weeks to make, I just can’t get there from here.’ You’re talking millions of dollars worth of tooling investment up front, and probably waiting three or four years while the stuff gets made. You can’t start a business under those conditions.”

Rather than fight the math, Norm decided to change the conditions. The key, he says, was to make the tooling in-house, but he didn’t understand anything about CNC machinery. “I knew I was going to do this company, but the missing link was the tooling. I decided to get myself educated.”

	The ability to make tooling in-house and react quickly to the needs of the market have been critical to the OE Quality Friction’s success.

During his consulting days, Norm had run across a small company in Florida that made some of its own tooling; he decided to pay them a visit. “They had a Haas VF-3 tucked in a corner which made a little bit of tooling,” Norm says. “I spent three months standing by the operator’s side, basically learning about CNC machines. The Haas was a very nice machine – it performed beautifully. So I convinced myself absolutely that I was going to come back, take a course in NC programming and buy a Haas. It was very simple. I didn’t look at any other machine.”

Norm’s intent was to get a VF-3, just as the shop in Florida had. But when he contacted the local Haas distributor, he found they only had a VF-4 on the floor, and they thought that might be sold. If he really wanted it, they said, then he ought to come down with some money.

Though his financing still hadn’t come through, Norm bit the bullet and bought the machine. “I didn’t have a facility to put it in,” he laughs, “so I had it delivered to a friend’s facility, where we got it wired up and running. At the same time, I was taking my CNC course, and I set up the machine and played with it. I had a few scary moments, but finally got to the point where I was proficient,” he says. “In the meantime, we’d found a facility, the bank had given us approval to start the business, the other shareholders came in and we got started.”

That was back in 1997. By September of 1998, the company was seriously producing parts, and by 1999, OE Quality Friction was a profitable concern.

Today, OE Quality Friction manufacturers more than 220 different part numbers of disc brake pads, and that number continues to grow. “We are right up to date on domestic light truck and sport utility applications,” Norm says. “We’ve got a full line of domestics, and we’re branching into the import car. We’re tooled right up to the 2001 model year vehicles.”

The ability to make tooling in-house and react quickly to the needs of the market have been critical to the company’s success. OE is one of only two brake pad manufacturers in North America that makes their own tooling.

“We churn out about five sets of tools a month,” Norm says, “and it costs us about $2050 Canadian to make a complete set, which is very, very inexpensive.” That’s a far cry from the $10,000 per set and six- to eight-week delivery time they could expect from an outside supplier.

A completed set of tooling for disc brake pads – a bottom plate, cavity plate and punch plate. OE Quality Friction machines all of its tooling in-house out of 4140 HT alloy steel

A complete set of disc brake tooling consists of a bottom plate, a cavity plate and a punch plate. The bottom plate holds the steel backing plates for each brake pad, the cavity plate sits on top of that to mold the outer profiles of the pads and the punch plate carries the punches that fit exactly into each cavity to form the pad’s top surface. A cavity plate may have as many as 20 cavities, or as few as 8, depending on the size of the pads, and the punch plate will hold a corresponding number of punches.

Since each punch has to fit exactly into a corresponding cavity, the typical manufacturing method, Norm says, is to use wire EDM to cut the slugs out of the cavity plate, then machine those slugs and use them as the punches. But OE Quality is far from typical: They machine all of the tooling out of 4140 heat-treated alloy steel plate.

“We turn the cavity plate into Swiss cheese by very aggressively milling out these cavities,” says Norm. “Then we take another chunk of steel and cut it up to make all the punches that fit perfectly inside these cavities.” When asked why he doesn’t use wire EDM, he replies: “If you look at the time it takes to wire EDM, we’d have the cavity plate sitting on the machine for a week. And as much as it seems sacrilege to take all that expensive tool steel and turn it into chips, the Haas does the job in about a quarter of the time – and time is much more expensive than the tool steel. We knock out a cavity plate in about a day.”

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Article and photographs courtesy of CNC Machining Magazine (Winter 2001) and Haas Automation, Inc.