NSH Group & NSH USA
NSH USA and the NSH Group: Dedicated to Continuous Improvement
This article first appeared in the Railway-News Magazine Issue 1 2024.
NSH USA Corporation (Albany, New York and Sterling Heights, Michigan) and our partner companies in the NSH Group (Niles-Simmons-Hegenscheidt) understand that ‘good enough’ is never good enough. Consequently, we regularly update our machinery to better meet customer needs as well as ever-evolving industry safety, production and environmental requirements.
One example of this process is evident in our wheel boring and machining product line. Over several decades aspects of the design have evolved to increase performance. For instance, the cutting tool in our previous wheel borer, the Simmons WMC-200, utilised an electronic boring bar. The current machine, the Simmons WTC-250, employs single-point tooling with an automatic tool changer for increased versatility. The cutting tool is clamped in a vertical ram mounted on a bridge which straddles the wheel for optimal stiffness.
The table for holding or ‘chucking’ the wheel during machining is another enhancement. Our design automatically chucks a wide range of wheel diameters (roughly 300mm) without manually changing the chuck jaws. Older versions of the machine required the operator to manually reposition heavy chuck jaws if the wheel diameter exceeded the narrow chucking range of the previous jaw setup.
With the evolving landscape of operator safety concerns, our modern designs prioritise chip management and containment. Our guarding and covers keep the operator safely removed from the machining operation while also keeping the flying metal chips inside the machine.
