Mid-State Builds Titanic Tombstone

Mid-State Machine Products is well-known for producing tombstone workholding fixtures. The company builds all configurations and sizes, from materials including cast iron and aluminum.

But one tombstone the company recently produced for in-house use tops 'em all for sheer size, says president Tim McCabe. Produced from a 15,000-lb Meehanite iron casting—"the patterns, as you might imagine, were pretty complex," McCabe says modestly—the tombstone will be used to hold four, 7-ton turbine components for machining on Mid-State's new Toshiba horizontal mill.

The first of two of the gigantic horizontal machines is just coming on-line at Mid-State. The company has also made other recent capital equipment and infrastructure investments, including six vertical turning lathes (VTLs) and a 15,000-ft² warehouse.

Mid-State has built large tombstones in the past, but never one quite the size of this10-ft-tall behemoth, McCabe says. But, he adds, the production method for the monster was the same as for the company's smaller tombstones: the job of producing the casting was farmed out to one of three foundries that worked regularly with Mid-State. In-house, a reference surface was established and the huge casting was stood up and finished in one machining cycle. Accuracy thus is equal to that of the machine the tombstone was finished on.

McCabe says the large fixture is a good illustration of illustrates the company's strength in building custom tombstones for just about any fixturing requirement. "It's just as easy for us to do custom work as it is for a customer to select from our standard catalog," he concludes.

Mid-State Machine Products Inc., 1501 Verti Drive, Winslow, ME 04901 USA. Phone (207) 873-6136; fax (207) 872-2017.

By Jim Destefani