Bourn & Koch is looking for feedback from our customers on their Blanchard grinders! Blanchard built a great grinding machine and we have continued that tradition since our acquisition of them in 2004. We value your opinion of Blanchard grinders and want to include your thoughts on the features of the machine and design of new models.  To share your feedback, please click the below link and complete the survey.

Click Here to Start the Survey!

The Blanchard Grinder survey will have multiple questionnaires over the course of the next 3-6 months. If you would like to be contacted for the next round of questions, please make sure to click “Contact for next round of survey?” at the beginning of the form. To learn more about our new Blanchard grinders, please contact us at 815-298-5485 or via email at [email protected]. For repair parts or field service, contact us at 815-713-2334 or via email at [email protected].

Bourn & Koch is a provider of field service and preventative maintenance for nearly 30 American machine tool companies. Since 2004, our field service technicians have expertly serviced thousands of machines from Bullard, Blanchard, Barber-Coleman, Fellows, DeVlieg and many more.

As we continue to grow as a company, one of our main focuses is the growth of our service department. We understand that no one can afford machine down-time. This is why Bourn & Koch has decided to build a team comprised of factory-trained preventative maintenance technicians. Our quick response team is here to assist your company with machine down situations, as well as advise on a preventative maintenance plan to avoid the next machine down situation. Whether you have a manual Blanchard surface grinder from 1940 or a new B&K 100H gear hobber, our experts are here to help maximize your machine tool up-time and profits in your shop.

Individually based on your company’s needs, our dedicated technicians will create a plan of action for keeping all of your Bourn & Koch products operational and productive. We will thoroughly inspect and evaluate your machine from top to bottom. Then, our experts can provide maintenance recommendations and schedule a wellness check for all of your Bourn & Koch products. Our technicians also offer training to educate your in-house maintenance personal on monthly checks and maintenance for your machines. Each contract is built to suit your company’s needs and expectations.

Maximizing machine up-time is crucial to maximizing profits in your shop. So why wait? Contact one of our service representatives at [email protected] today for further information!

You can find the majority of American machine tool companies our aftermarket & service team supports right here!

Bourn & Koch, Inc. and FANUC worked together on a video case study. Bourn & Koch requires controls that can support every manufacturing application we work on.  We build machine tools for a wide variety of applications. The support that we receive from FANUC made it an easy decision to standardize on their CNC controls. FANUC  provides a product that meets each one of our needs.

It has become increasing more difficult to find experienced machine tool operators. Many of our customers need a machine that someone with little or no experience can easily learn to run. An important advantage of working with FANUC is that we are able to incorporate Bourn & Koch’s proprietary conversational HMI software. This allows us to provide a machine that nearly anyone can learn to program and operate.

Check out this great video case study below to learn more about our partnership with FANUC. You can learn more about FANUC at their website by clicking here.

Contact one of our representatives at [email protected] or by calling (815) 965-4013 and ask to speak with someone from our Machine Sales team.

Not only will Bourn & Koch be showcasing our machine tool solutions all week at IMTS 2018, we are pleased to announce that we will be hosting an open house during the week of IMTS 2018 as well! We are inviting the global manufacturing community to receive a behind-the-scenes look into how high-quality precision machine tools are still being built, right here in America!

Tours will be held at 10 am on September 11th & 13th (Tuesday & Thursday). Included in the tour will be an exclusive look into our massive print room where we have over 2,500 years of combined engineering knowledge from Blanchard, Fellows, Springfield, DeVlieg, Bullard, Barber Coleman, and many more classic American Machine Tool companies! Also, you will get a full factory tour including our shop floor where we remanufacture machines to OEM specifications and build brand new machines by incorporating new technology and design into our grinders, hobbers, and gear shapers. The most exciting part is that our newly redesigned and re-engineered Blanchard 22AD-42 will be on display for demonstration during the tour!

Our facility is located in Rockford, Illinois which is approximately 90 miles from McCormick Place. If you interested in taking a tour of Bourn & Koch’s facility but are unable to make it on Tuesday or Thursday (Sept. 11th & 12th), other days are available by appointment only.

For more information or to register for the Open House, please call (815) 713-2305 or email [email protected].

 

Bourn & Koch provides field service and preventative maintenance for nearly 30 American machine tool companies. Since 2004, we have expertly serviced thousands of machines from Bullard, Blanchard, Barber-Colman, Fellows, DeVlieg and many more. Our field service technicians are factory-trained to repair your machine quickly, reducing downtime and guesswork about which parts are required for repair. Our field service technicians are also based throughout the United States and travel worldwide to provide expert repair services for all machine tools that we support.

Machine tool uptime is the key to maximizing profits in your shop. One way to maximize uptime is to ensure your machine is in top shape with a preventative maintenance visit. A preventative maintenance visit allows for a factory-trained field servcice technician to thoroughly inspect and evaluate your machine from top to bottom. A thorough check of all machine systems such as hydraulics and lubrication is performed along with verification of alignments and documentation of all possible maintenance issues. Any identified issues can then be repaired before they cause serious downtime, keeping your machine and your shop productive!

To help you keep your American machine tools productive, we are offering a special on all service support orders and preventative maintenance visits through the month of May. Simply include the special code of BKSERVICE on your purchase order to your customer care representative when placing your order.  We will discount the total of your service support or preventative maintenance visit by 5% or $500.00, whichever is the lesser.

Act now to request a quote and reserve your technician as this special will not last long! Contact [email protected] for further information!

Is your Blanchard magnetic chuck having issues? Does it still hold your workpieces to the table? Have you thrown any workpieces off of the table recently?  Bourn & Koch can rebuild your Blanchard’s magnetic chuck to work like new again!

As the OEM for Blanchard, Bourn & Koch’s customer care grind team will walk you through a trouble shooting process to determine if your Blanchard magnetic chuck needs to be rebuilt or not.  If it is determined that rebuild is required, your magnetic chuck can be sent in for testing and a full evaluation. We will provide a full evaluation report of our findings and recommendations on what can be done to restore your magnetic chuck’s workholding ability. Bourn & Koch’s highly skilled team of Blanchard mechanical assemblers and electronic technicians will get to work restoring your Blanchard chuck to OEM specifications. A brand new contact ring and coils will be installed before the face and bottom plate are sealed water tight. Each chuck has a pull test done on the poles and megger readings are taken to ensure that it meets OEM specifications. After rebuilding of your Blanchard magnetic chuck has been completed, a warranty will be provided for 1 year. Brush holder assemblies and chuck controls are offered as well.

Our grind team is here to help! With years of experience, our lead grinding customer care representative, James Hunt, can get your Blanchard magnetic chuck  rebuilt in no time. You can contact James via email at [email protected] or by calling 815-713-2334.

Showcasing Our Full Line of Solutions

Bourn & Koch is gearing up (pun intended) for IMTS 2018! IMTS is the premier trade show for the metal-working industry. This year we will be showcasing our full line of machine tool solutions in our booth. We’re excited to show the full breadth and depth of the advanced manufacturing solutions that Bourn & Koch offers! American machine tools are back and better than ever.

The Springfield VBG: Taking Aerospace Grinding to New Heights

Our newly redesigned Springfield VBG will be on display. The Springfield VBG is one of the most rigid vertical grinding platforms available on the market, incorporating advanced technologies and in-process inspection to automatically grind numerous surfaces to extreme tolerances down to .0001″.

Built on the modular base, column, and crossrail of our vertical lathe, the VBG is designed to not only offer precision grinding but also integrated vertical turning for processing workpieces in one set-up. Featuring a precision Setco grinding spindle, rotary dressing, tool probing, Renishaw part probing, programmable CNC B & C axes, the VBG is the logical choice for aerospace shops to effectively process their most demanding workpieces with little to no human intervention.

IMTS will mark the debut of this platform with a Fanuc CNC control with our intuitive BKI-G HMI. The BKI-G HMI allows gives operators and programmers full conversational inputs to make even the most complex parts and grinding processes easy to learn and program.

The New Remanufactured Fellows 10-4: The Crowned King of Gear Shapers

Bourn & Koch showcased our new BKI-S-HMI and Easy Automate enclosure on our remanufactured Fellows 10-4 CNC gear shapers at Gear Expo 2017. The machine was the highlight of our booth, garnering attention from customers and competitors alike.

We are integrating our industry leading, patented electronic crowning and taper technology into a remanufactured machine for the first time. Widely recognized as the standard in electronic crowning and taper, Bourn & Koch will make this technology truly affordable on a remanufactured machine tool platform. Even more exciting is our introduction of additional advanced features to the remanufactured Fellows 10-4.

Our remanufactured Fellows 10-4 features standard three (3) axis CNC gear shaping with a Fanuc 0i control. The machine is available with up to six (6) CNC machine tool axes which include programmable stroke length and programmable stroke position. Remanufactured Fellows 10-4 gear shapers are ideal for job shops looking to introduce high-quality gear manufacturing into their machine tool line-up while adding flexibility to their capabilities with just one gear shaping machine.

The Bourn & Koch 100H-T: Highly Accurate Hobbing & Turning in One Machine

The Bourn & Koch 100H has been one of our flagship machines, with numerous installations across aerospace, automotive, oil & gas, and many other key industries. With many job shops and tier-one suppliers turning to gear hobbing attachments on lathes and machining centers with often poor results, we have engineered a seven-station turning turret  into our 100H.

The 100H is capable of cutting up to AGMA Class-13 gears (Class 9-10 typical). With the integration of turning to our 100H gear hobber, precision parts can now be manufactured in one set-up to reduce overall cycle time, free up floor space, and increase workpiece accuracy. The integrated seven-station turret will enable turning and boring of workpieces within one setup. Generated workpiece blanks can then be hobbed to high accuracy by the hob spindle.

Our H-Series gear hobbers now ship with our patent-pending Adjustable Hob Arbor Spacers and our BKI-H-HMI, allowing for the easy set-up, programming, and manufacturing of high-quality gears by even the most novice of machine tool operators. The BKI-H-HMI features conversational programming of spur & helical gears with crown and taper programming integrated to the HMI functionality.

The Blanchard 8AD-12 : Truly Automated Blanchard Grinding

The Blanchard Surface Grinder is one of the most iconic machine tools ever built. The characteristic “Blanchard Grind” produced by these machines is synonymous with a quality ground part to tight tolerances. Since 2004, Bourn & Koch has been building, rebuilding, & remanufacturing Blanchard grinders to continue on the storied tradition of these machine tools. As the global manufacturing landscape is changing and evolving, we are re-imagining and re-engineering the Blanchard Surface Grinder to meet today’s manufacturing challenges.

Most exciting of the features we will exhibit at IMTS 2018 is fully integrated automation to the Blanchard 8AD-12 Surface Grinder. Typically a manual process, the integration of flexible automation to the Blanchard grinder will allow manufacturers to increase productivity while allowing operators to focus on value added tasks rather than machine tending.

Bourn & Koch will once again be hosting world-renowned expert Richard King to teach a class on the art of handscraping machine tools! This year marks our third class with Mr. King, who has taught hundreds of machine tool builders the art of handscraping. The class is a full week of education and hands on scraping experience at our Rockford, Illinois facility. Students are taught the basics of machine tool handscraping and Biax Power-Scraping over the week-long course. A full tour of our facility is offered as well.

The class will be held from March 12th through the 16th of 2018. Email [email protected] to reserve your spot in the class today! To learn more about Richard King and his experience in machine tools visit www.handscraping.com.

The world’s largest event focusing solely on the gear manufacturing industry is almost here! Gear Expo 2017 kicks off October 24th at the Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio. Bourn & Koch will be exhibiting in booth 407, showcasing two of our most popular machines – the 100H Gear Hobber and the Fellows 10-4! Both machines have been a staple of our machine tool offerings for well over a decade, however new features will be debuted at the show that will be sure to give attendees a new perspective on our capabilities.

Our newly designed BKI-HMI will be demoed in the booth, allowing customers to experience just how easy we have made programming a high-quality hobbed gear to be! Attendees can schedule an appointment to have their application reviewed and programmed by our team in the booth. The Fellows 10-4 has an all new look as well! Both machines will be available for sale at the show and can be shipped direct to your shop floor.

Check out a video of our brand new 100H gear hobber in action below and see it in person at the show! For complimentary passes to the show, email us at [email protected]. Hope to see you at the show!

Bourn & Koch will be hosting Richard King, renowned hand-scraping expert, to teach a week-long class at our manufacturing plant in Rockford, Illinois. The dates for the class are March 6th through the 10th. Rich’s classes cover the basics of scraping, including half-moon hand scraping, and Biax power scraping with a goal of students being able to scrape to 20 points per inch. Each student will work on a personal project under Rich’s guidance. Additional topics such as leveling, aligning, gib straightening, and scraping Rulon/Turcite will be covered. A tour of Bourn & Koch’s facility will be included.

As one of the last true American Machine Tool Builders, Bourn & Koch is proud to say we hand-scrape nearly every machine tool we build and rebuild. The process of hand-scraping is vital to the precision of a machine tool. Many of our machine tool assemblers and service technicians are experts at hand-scraping. We hosted Rich’s class last year and plan to hold classes two to three times per year to keep the lost art of hand-scraping alive.

To register for the class, email Rich King at [email protected]. To learn more about Rich King and his storied history in the machine tool industry, visit his website – www.handscraping.com.