October 30, 1997
Contact: Andrew Careaga; 573-341-4328; [email protected]
STUDENT'S LADLE DESIGN MAKES DIE-CASTING MORE AFFORDABLE
ROLLA, Mo. -- A University of Missouri-Rolla student's design is helping small-engine maker Briggs & Stratton realize big savings in its die-casting operations.
Michael Reily of St. Charles, Mo., a junior mechanical engineering major at UMR, developed a new design for ladles uses in the die-casting operations at Briggs & Stratton's plant in Rolla, Mo. Reily, who works part time at the plant, noticed one day in 1996 that the stainless steel ladle cups Briggs & Stratton used to pour molten aluminum from a holding furnace into the die- casting machines were quickly wearing out.
"The molten aluminum would eat right through the bucket, and it would leak," he says.
Reily thought he could come up with a more durable and longer-lasting design. He made some prototypes at UMR's foundry, tested them in the Briggs & Stratton plant, and found that his product lasted several weeks -- and cost about one-tenth the cost of the stainless steel ladles to make. Now, his design is being used by the Briggs & Stratton plants in Rolla and Poplar Bluff, Mo., as well as in foundries in St. Clair, Mo., and Sparta, Ill. The Briggs & Stratton headquarters in Milwaukee also is phasing in Reily's ladles, as is a Briggs plant in Statesboro, Ala.
"We were consuming one ladle every three days," Reily says. "One day I was talking to one of the guys at work and said, 'Why don't we make something better?'"
So Reily took on the task. He approached Dr. Don Askeland, Distinguished Teaching Professor of metallurgical engineering at UMR, for advice and assistance.
Reily then used the metallurgical engineering department's foundry facility to produce three prototype ladle cups out of cast iron.
Reily assembled a pattern for the ladle cup out of styrofoam, then he and a friend, metallurgical engineering student Alex Bowman, made a sample cup.
"The first one lasted about six weeks," Reily says. "The second one lasted 11 or 12 weeks."
Briggs & Stratton was interested in using Reily's longer-lasting design. Through Askeland, Reily connected with William F. Priesmeyer, a 1960 graduate of UMR and the vice president at Excelsior Foundry in Belleville, Ill., to mass-produce the ladles for Briggs & Stratton.
Briggs & Stratton's Rolla plant recognized Reily through its "business improvement team," or BIT.
Reily notes that Briggs & Stratton encourages employees to come up with new ideas, and that suits his fancy just fine.
"I'm always looking for ways to improve things," he says.
But Reily's concept -- using cast iron -- is nothing new, he admits. "They used to use cast iron years ago," he says. "I kind of took old technology and adapted it to a new situation."
He doesn't really know why die-casting operations ever switched from cast iron to steel for their ladles.
"I'm sure somebody knows why, but I never could find out an answer," he says.
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