Ron Spring, Plant Tooling Manager
Butler Manufacturing Company Galesburg, IL

“ Butler is the largest manufacturer of steel buildings in the world. In the building division, Galesburg is the largest plant, we call it the mother plant. We have six plants in the US plus plants in China, Saudi Arabia and Hungary. We build everything from agricultural buildings to office buildings, schools, churches. All are completely made to order...all custom.”

How do you punch all of the holes in the building?
“ It depends on what the part is. Where we use UniPunch tooling a lot is in our trim areas...where we don’t roll form the part because of volume...we uncoil it, shear it to size, punch and then brake it if it needs to be broke. We punch up to 1/2-inch with UniPunch. We punch a lot of holes every year...thousands and thousands of holes a year.”

Butler is a big company with many variations within its product line. How important is the reusability of UniPunch tooling to you?
“ It’s real important. That’s one of the main reasons why we are a big user of UniPunch tooling. It would be a lot easier for me if we made everything the same every day, but that is not how we operate. The big advantage of UniPunch tooling is that you can move the units around on the templates, you can change setups, you can do a lot of different things.”

Do you use dedicated setups here at Butler?
“ We do a lot more dedicated setups of UniPunch tooling today than we used to. We used to have three die rooms in this plant where a die maintenance person would make the setups. When they were done with it, they would bring it back and he would tear it down and clean it up. But now, we’re down to one die room, and we have a lot of dedicated setups that we leave set up because it saves time.”

What determines whether you make a hard die or use unitized tooling to produce a part?
“ It’s usually volume. When we develop a new product line, our product engineering department puts a forecast against it. The number I have in my head is...if we are looking at more than 25,000 parts a year we will take a pretty hard look at hard tooling. If it’s a complex part with difficult forming and the only way to make it is with hard tooling, then we have no choice other than to go to a progressive die. But we still make a lot of parts where we punch them flat on UniPunch tooling and then form them. "

“ We have a 25 foot, 700 ton press that we run UniPunch tooling in every day. When we change the setup on that big press, we roll the setup out of the press with a power winch, change the units outside of the press, and then roll it back in.”

Back To Top