Rhin-O-Tuff Improves Profitability on its Punch & Binding Machines With Its Mitsubishi MV 1200S Wire EDMYou may not have heard of Rhin-O-Tuff, a brand of Performance Design LLC, though their products are sold worldwide. But if your company uses binders for presentations, proposals and documents, the local printer you take your media to likely is using Rhin-O-Tuff punch and binding machines.
Here’s a little history on this Boise, Idaho-based company. More than 2 decades ago, in 1994, Marvin Whiteman, former owner of Whiteman Industries was approached to design a part for a tabletop paper punch machine. Marvin and his team had a history and passion for building tough high performance products. They had designed and built racecars and motorcycles. Marvin and his team felt they could invent a better, more flexible and efficient family of paper punches. So together they started Performance Design, Inc. and built their first tabletop punch with interchangeable dies called the Versa Punch.
Soon thereafter they realized customers wanted more flexibility to add modules to decrease the time it took them to punch and stack documents, and modules to address the binding of documents with plastic coil, double loop wire or comb.
So the concept modular tabletop punches and binding solutions was born. They designed and manufactured paper punches and finishing equipment that could be configured in a variety of ways to solve a wide range of document punching and binding challenges. The new modular designed products were branded Rhin-O-Tuff.
Today Rhin-O-Tuff offers a full range of paper punching and document binding systems. The Rhin-O-Tuff brand of equipment is known for high quality and unsurpassed durability by thousands of commercial and corporate users.
Whether the need is to increase productivity in a copy center, bindery, digital printing environment, or to add the convenience of doing binding “in-house” for a corporate office, Rhin-O-Tuff has the binding, document finishing, or document handling solution to handle all your demands, and their products are sold around the world through a network of authorized dealers and distributor partners. Their US-based clients most often utilize plastic coil binding, and twin loop binding in more often used in their products designed for Europe. Rhin-O-Tuff systems come with a 3-year warranty and they are environmentally friendly at 98% recyclable.
All Rhin-O-Tuff machines are designed and manufactured at their headquarters in Boise, Idaho, and the company has been awarded patents for their innovative designs. The company’s machine shop is equipped with several vertical mills and one large horizontal mill.
Steven Parker, Product Development Engineer with 5 years of tenure at the company, says, “We were doing nearly all of our machining in house but we were outsourcing our EDM requirements to a local machine shop. “It was specifically our punch dies with oval shaped holes drove our EDM requirements because we didn’t have a way to make them on any of our exist-ing machines.” We manufacture different dies depending on the number of holes and spacing required.”
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Steven says that Rhin-O-Tuff was outsourcing the wire EDM largely because they didn’t have EDM experience internally. “We were spending a significant amount of money on outsourcing, though, and when we did the ROI on buy versus outsource, it became evident that we needed to find a way to bring this in-house.”
Steven and his team researched a number of manufacturers of wire EDM machine tools, and they selected 4 high quality machines to receive pricing on. They even utilized test cuts to compare the different lines. Steven says, “We selected the Mitsubishi MV1200S EDM because it was a proven machine with an excellent reputation, and its test cut results were outstanding. We also chose it because we were comfortable with the level of support we received pre-sale, and that we would receive post-sale.” He says that service was even more of a critical factor due to the fact that EDM was a new machining technique for the company. He added that the company appreciated the fact that Mitsubishi is a leader in electrical discharge machining innovation, and that they continue to push the envelope to develop the most accurate, reliable and technically advanced products in the world. An added bonus to
Rhin-O-Tuff was that the Mitsubishi EDM was less expensive than any of the other manufacturer’s offerings.
Rhin-O-Tuff was that the Mitsubishi EDM was less expensive than any of the other manufacturer’s offerings.
Prior to the purchase, the team from Rhin-O-Tuff visited Mitsubishi’s Regional Sales and Support Center in Long Beach, California. In California, the team learned that Mitsubishi provides preventative maintenance, laser calibration, application support, and even remote monitoring for its customers.
Rhin-O-Tuff purchased their Mitsubishi MV1200S EDM in late 2015 from Smith Machinery, who carries a number of fine machine tool lines, including the Mitsubishi line. Smith Machinery has been the distributor of a variety of advanced manufacturing technologies for more than 5 decades. Today, David Soares, (pictured above in the center, at the Mitsubishi Corporate Center), supports many of Smith Machinery’s customers, including Rhin-O-Tuff. He says, “At Smith Machinery, we support manufacturers and job shops in Utah, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. In our Salt Lake City showroom we stock a variety of these technologies and can provide custom demonstrations, test cuts, process development, training classes and turnkey projects.” David says that the MV series, introduced to the market about 5 years ago, reduces power consumption and use of consumable parts to cut running cost by as much as 42% over Mitsubishi Electric’s older FA series.
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Clark Smith, owner of the company, says, “For U.S. manufacturing to compete and thrive, we must promote investment in higher technologies to make us globally competitive. Guided by the motto “Technology Solutions for Competitive Manufacturing” our mission is to support you and your efforts to make quality products competitively!”
Steven says that Mitsubishi’s support from the time of purchase was outstanding. “We sent them sample parts and they actually wrote the programs to get us started”, he elaborated. Since then, Steven says that the machine has been extremely reliable, and he added, “They emphasize the importance of keeping the machine clean and staying on top of the maintenance — while it is prudent to do this with any machine — it is even more critical with EDM machines.”
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Today, Rhin-O-Tuff has a programmer that is adept at programming all of the company’s machines, and the operator who runs the Mitsubishi EDM can simultaneously run 2 additional machines. “With our EDM, once you set-up the machine, it can run for very long times”, Steven said. He adds, “Our Mitsubishi EDM has met all of our expectations for Return On Investment (ROI), our operating costs are just what we calculated, and we are saving a significant amount of money since taking EDM in-house.”
Contact Rhin-O-Tuff, proud USA manufacturer of print punch and
binding machines, at 800-390-5782 or visit Rhin-O-Tuff.com
binding machines, at 800-390-5782 or visit Rhin-O-Tuff.com
41 West Guest Avenue
Salt Lake City, UT 84115
Phone: 801-263-6403
Fax: 801-263-6404
Email: smc@smithmachinetools.com
Salt Lake City, UT 84115
Phone: 801-263-6403
Fax: 801-263-6404
Email: smc@smithmachinetools.com