550xp-wcs-001-092402

West Coast Saw (WCS) is a principal client for Allied Steel. They offer aftermarket parts for chainsaws and widely known for their unique “felling dogs.” If you’re not familiar with that term, felling dogs or fellings are steel flanges that flank the bar of a chainsaw, and used for both leverage and safety during operation. The term is derived from the phrase: felling a tree. While at Allied Steel, I was asked to evaluate and improve many of their existing products, and also help develop new products. One of those products were fellings for a new Husqvarna model, the 550XP. The plastic housing of this model created a particular challenge for us because it required the outer flange to be formed twice, once on each side, and within a very short distance. Our press brake operator, a 30-year technician, said that he could form one set of fellings to fit flawlessly, but making hundreds of them, even with a jig, would be nearly impossible. I was approached with an intriguing proposition: to design tooling that could streamline the process into on single step. What made this task particularly interesting was the fact that no one at Allied Steel had any experience making specialized tooling, and yet, I was entrusted with the project. To put this into perspective: it took the press brake operator about 20-30 presses, little taps back and forth, in order to get one set to fit properly; so, repeatability at any scale was impossible. Once I had a control model, I developed a test to gauge the exact form of the flange, and then used that information along with direct measurements of the press brake, such as min/max heigh constraints and so forth, to design the tooling. The result was a viable method for single press operation at scale.