Premium Frac Pumps Triples Productivity With Kennametal Tools

(FT. WORTH, TX) -- Using Kennametal tools that reduce tooling costs by half and triple productivity, Premium Frac Pumps (PFP) is a thriving 33-employee, $10 million enterprise that produces heavy-duty equipment for the demanding oil- and natural gas-drilling industry.

PFP machines 12,000-pound, 60x30x30-inch blocks of forged steel into 5,800-pound fluid cylinders with many complex holes for attaching other components, and ultimately ships completed frac pump assemblies to the field.

Kevin Riley, the company's president, started the operation with three CNC milling machines and a $50 million purchase order for pumps that energy companies use to inject a high-pressure mixture of sand and water into the earth to break up well blockages. Riley, who expects his company to reach between $30 million and $40 million in sales next year, credits Kennametal for a large percentage of PFP's success. "Within eight months of opening, we started shipping product," says Riley. But the product was taking a long time to produce, according to Riley and PFP lead programmer Dominic Freeze.

"Productivity was fairly low," Freeze says. "There wasn't a whole lot getting done because it was taking us about 180 hours to machine one part down." That was until earlier this year, when Kennametal applications engineer Mark Davis paid a call on PFP and suggested using a 6-inch Kennametal BMD600R8607S150L250 cutter to get through the scale on the outside of the forgings.

"Scale on a forging is a nasty nightmare," Freeze says. "There'll be hard spots and soft spots and the hard spots are extremely tough to get through. In the forging process, it's tough to get a forging to cool evenly, so you end up with this scale on the outside. A lot of our forgings come in with a half inch of scale."

Davis brought in Kennametal milling specialist Dave Stewart to help optimize the scale busting and other milling processes on the fluid end. The Kennametal milling cutter and the application skills of the Kennametal team took hours off of this process. Machining the scale off of one side of the forging required three indexes on a competitive face mill. The Kennametal team removed the scale and sized the block on the same corner, saving significant indexing time. They further optimized the sizing and shaping process with another new Kennametal milling product, a 6-inch Dodeka cutter, KSHR600HN5345M8.

PFP had gone through a lot of competitive tools and inserts on its huge Toshiba and Koraki horizontal milling machines before choosing the Kennametal solution. The situation was costing the company about $20,000 per month in inserts. Both the BMD600R8607S150L250 cutter and the Dodeka cutter use grade KC935M inserts, a multi-layer CVD coated grade designed for dry machining at high SFMs. The BMD-series cutters offer a depth-of-cut capability to .500-inch using a one-inch diameter by .375-inch thick positive insert for heavy milling with a minimum of four indexes per insert. The Dodeka cutter offers 12 cutting edges per insert with .178-inch depth of cut capability.

"It was so much of an improvement over what we were doing we had no choice but to switch," Freeze says. "They're extremely free cutting. I'm able to increase depths of cut, cover more surface footage, and have larger cubic inches per minute of material removal. We're taking 80- to 100-cubic inch cuts, which is insane." Now, because of the Kennametal tools, the one-time 180-hour job is done in 54 hours, at about one-fourth of the cost.

With speed improved, productivity increased as well. Before using the Kennametal tools, PFP was able to finish just one or two fluid cylinders per week. Today, it completes one every day. If any more proof is needed, check PFP's 30-yard chip hopper. "Before, we'd empty the 30-yard chip hopper once every couple of weeks," Freeze says. "Now we have to do it every single day, sometimes more than once a day."

PFP has had such a positive experience with the Kennametal face mills that the company now is in the process of converting to 100 percent Kennametal tools. Overall, the productivity will be three times what it was and the cost about half with the Kennametal tools, Freeze predicts.

PFP has grown from three CNC machines to 12 CNC mills and is in the midst of an expansion into a 40,000-square-foot building across the street from their current location. The original 27,000- square-foot facility will be dedicated to assembly operations while the new building will house machinery.

"Kennametal has been working closely with us," Riley says. "They've come up with some incredible speeds and feeds. They're an awesome company to work with. They've furnished us with a lot of test products and I think Dominic has proven all of their theories. We appreciate all they've done for us."

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