Just-in-Time V-Packing

Upgrading legacy forging presses with leak free seals    

A large forging mill in Worcester, Mass., that supplies parts to the aerospace industry was leaking oil from multiple main rams. It costed the mill $10,000 per month in lost oil. The decade-old V-Pack sets were running dangerously close to total failure.

 The mill planned a four-day shutdown that would cost $300,000 in lost productivity. But a larger problem loomed: maintenance managers had limited information about the actual size of the ram. To verify the dimensions, they needed to disassemble the presses during shutdown. But new V-Packing usually takes four weeks to produce, ship and deliver.

Extending the shutdown for a month would cost more than $2 million dollars in lost productivity. Plant managers considered leaving the old V-Packing in place, despite the cost of lost oil, the risk of catastrophic failure and potential damage to the press. System Seals, however, presented a different approach.

System Seals designed a new concept V-Packing with the ability to cover a wide range of variable sizes during installation. It was part of System Seals’ Elite line, which blends rigid polyurethane seals with traditional V-Packing materials. The combination of soft and hard seals provides a leak-free solution that typically last twice as long as cloth-and-rubber seals.

But it was the size adjustability that enabled the mill to replace the packing within the four-day outage window and resume operations with a significantly improved, leak-free solution. The approach saved the company about $2.5 million and eliminated the threat of damaging the rams.