When asked how Lifetime continues to thrive with design, engineering and manufacturing largely in the United States, long-term employee and Machine Shop manager Kelly Martinez (25 years tenure) says, “We have superior design engineers, and an entire team of employees that are dedicated to coming up with innovative ideas for new products and product improvements. We know that innovation isn’t a luxury - it’s a necessity for our growth.” Kelly continued, “Early on in our existence, we set up our own engineering department and our own machine shop. Since we do all of our own mold and tool and die making in-house (we even make many of the machines needed for our operations), we save time and money. In the past, when we’ve outsourced tooling to a 3rd party, the tooling time increased 2 to 3 fold.” With all design and manufacturing under their control, products typically move from design to production in under a year. New design ideas often come from the suggestion boxes that are installed throughout the Lifetime campus.
The Utah-based state-of-the-art facility houses some of the industry’s most innovative equipment. Lifetime Metals is the region’s leading supplier of processed steel. From slitting and leveling, to roll forming, tube milling and stamping, their trained and certified staff manufactures quality, custom steel products at an exceptional value.
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Kelly and the machine shop team have a long history with Smith Machinery, and the Mazak machine tool line. In fact, they purchased their first Mazak more than 20 years ago, and only in the last few months did they sell that machine to make room for a new Mazak. Kelly says the 23-year old Mazak is still going strong, and was sold to a small local job shop. Today the company owns 4 Mazak vertical machining centers, including 2 NEXUS VNC-510Cs, a NEXUS VCS-410A, a VTC-300C, and one lathe, a Mazak QuickTurn NEXUS (QTN) 300 turning Center. The team says that they continue to purchase Mazak Machines from Smith Machinery for a number of reasons: • Reliability, accuracy, durability and ease of use.
• Powerful Mazak controls equipped with both Mazatrol conversational programming and G-Code programming.
• Outstanding service, both from Smith Machinery and Mazak direct. Kelly says Clark Smith, owner of Smith Machinery, and his team just care more about their customers than many other machine tool dealers.
• Superiority in consistently holding the tight tolerances that Lifetime requires for their tool steel parts.
• All of the Mazak machines in Lifetime’s Machine Shop are made in Florence, Kentucky. Last year, two of their programmers visited Mazak’s facilities to see how their machines are manufactured. This is important to Lifetime, as they also strive to maximize their manufacturing facilities in the United States. Kelly says, “We love companies that promote jobs in this country.”
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Lifetime’s latest machine tool purchase is a Mitsubishi MV1200S, Mitsubishi’s next generation high performance Wire EDM, which was installed last month. Though the company has other wire EDM machines, it was their first Mitsubishi purchase. Kelly says, “We had 3 different manufacturers perform competitive test cuts for our evaluation, and the Mitsubishi came out on top. It took 1/3 less time to cut the part, and it used 1/3 less wire consumption for a comparable finish and accuracy.” He continued, “Since it was our first for Mitsubishi, we contacted some local shops that owned Mitsubishi EDM’s. Not only did they love their machines, but they also stressed that the service support was outstanding. Mitsubishi has a staff of more than a dozen service engineers throughout the western United States to support their customers. This made our purchase decision easy.”
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