I received a disturbing phone call from a customer who had recently purchased a CNC Sinker EDM and a Wire EDM to do repair work in his very large, United Airlines, FAA-certified MRO (Maintenance, Repair Overhaul) facility located inside the San Francisco airport. He called to sheepishly ask me, "Can I take the EDM machines back?" (Aside) In comparison, for a Sales Manager to hear, "Can I take the machine back?" causes the same visceral, sinking feeling felt by a toolmaker after passing a part under the indicator stylus and the needle doesn't reach the low tolerance. "Please no!" He explained that his customer (Boeing) would not accept his first lot of parts because "...they had been EDM'ed." The parts met the print specs in every way dimensionally, but were rejected and set aside because "...the Heat Affected Zone (HAZ) must be removed." Like him, I found this hard to believe as we both knew that his customer was already processing these same parts themselves, in-house on the same equipment they had purchased a year earlier. Tim purchased his machines at their urging to support their in-house efforts (they had funds for off-site, overflow machining, but they had no budget for new machines until the new fiscal year).
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