VIDEO: TOOLING UP – Leveling Up Your End Mill’s Efficiency with OSG

Narrator: This video is brought to you by OSG, USA Innovative Solutions for the Manufacturing Industry. Welcome to Tooling Up, a series by MSC Industrial Supply Company. The show that provides real world insights and is brought to you by leading industry experts aimed at improving the efficiency and productivity of your operation. And now the host of Tooling Up, Mitch Free.

Mitch Free: Welcome to Tooling Up, the series from MSC that is meant to make you a better, more productive, more efficient manufacturer. I'm Mitch Free. If you're new here, please subscribe and hit the like button. My guest today is Alyssa O'Brien, Product Engineer with OSG, USA. Alyssa, thanks for joining me today.

Alyssa O'Brien: So happy to be here Mitch. Thank you for having me.

Mitch Free: Not only is OSG a really interesting, cool brand, but I get to interview you as a woman that's making things happen in manufacturing. So, looking forward to drilling into that story? No pun intended. But can you tell me what does OSG stand for?

Alyssa O'Brien: OSG stands for Oh so great. Oh, so grand, oh so good, but also stands for, technically, Osawa Screw Grinding.

Mitch Free: And very quick history of Osawa Screw Grinding?

Alyssa O'Brien: Yeah. Osawa, That is the family name that founded OSG over in Japan. Quite, quite a long time ago. And the family still to this day is involved in owning and operating the company.

Mitch Free: Tell me a little bit about your personal journey and how you got to OSG in such an important role.

Alyssa O'Brien: I started to, you know, grow a friend group and find interest in activities that surrounded, you know, problem solving and things like that, which later down the road in high school I had to start making decisions about what the heck I wanted to do with my life which led me into the path of engineering. And it was one of those friends that I had met in high school that called me up the summer after I graduated, said, hey, my company has got a design position open. I know you're looking. Do you want to apply? You know, it's called OSG.

Mitch Free: Tell me a little bit about the culture at OSG and what makes you excited to continue to work there and go there every day.

Alyssa O'Brien: So OSG uses this acronym called PRIDE and this acronym PRIDE stands for People, Respect, Integrity, Development and Excellence. And these are five core values that OSG really puts their heart and soul into. And the one that really speaks to me, that D for development, really, really sticks out to me, that freedom to develop myself in really whichever way suits me and works well for what I do every day the company is all for. So it's been really a pleasure to have that freedom and that support from my company.

Mitch Free: We're always looking for cutting tools and solutions that bring something unique. And as I understand it, OSG’s HY-PRO® CARB VGM has some very special characteristics. I'd love to hear your perspective and more details about that tool.

Alyssa O'Brien: Sure. Yeah. So VGM stands for variable geometry mill. End mill, solid carbide end mill. At the core of it, we wanted to apply this type of end mill for what the industry calls dynamic milling. One of the names is dynamic milling or high-efficiency milling. This is a 5-flute, a 6-flute and a 7-flute offering of end mills with over, I think it's like over 750 EDPs to choose from. Different sizes, different lengths of cut. I mean, it's an absolutely massive offering from OSG. It's great across the board for a wide range of materials, which makes it really amazing for job shops, diebold, automotive, just to name a few of the industries that we're seeing really great successes with.

It was designed originally for stainless steels and regular steels. But we've seen honestly, you know, it was such a home run with, with so many of our customers that they're curious to see what more it can do. So we've seen successes like, you know, inconels, titaniums, cast irons and all sorts of stuff.

Mitch Free: When you talk about high-efficiency milling, I imagine you're talking about big depth of cut, low radial engagement?

Alyssa O'Brien: Yes, absolutely. So this is still a 2D style milling concept for roughing and finishing. But the productivity comes from being able to increase your table feed to get your MRR, your metal removal rate, up to a productive level. The benefit over like a more conventional style milling pass where you're taking deep depths of cut with heavy stepover and going kind of slower and just kind of chugging along is that there's less risk with dynamic milling of accidentally overloading the tool.

What a dynamic milling process tries to do is shave equal amounts of chips off with every pass with very little variation in the thickness of the chip. Doesn't matter where on the part you are, and that just helps to make the load on the cutting edges more even and it can save tool life over the long run because you're controlling the temperature better and you're controlling the chip loads better.

Mitch Free: Alyssa, I can't let you go without mentioning the fact that you were recently featured in Aerospace Manufacturing and Design. It's just so impressive. You said it's such a great example for young men and women that are the next generation in manufacturing and design. I'd love to hear a little bit about your mission and your passion for that.

Alyssa O'Brien: I was featured, as you said, in Aerospace Manufacturing and Design back in March of this year. In the feature they called Women to Watch in Manufacturing. And then again, I was featured two months later in June along a similar vein in the same magazine under phases of manufacturing. And we honor Manufacturing Day by inviting, I think this year we had over like 90 students from high school and colleges come to our factory in Illinois, give them an overall view of what manufacturing in the United States is.

So seeing the lights turn on it and showing them what careers they can have in the manufacturing industry.

Mitch Free: Alyssa, thanks so much for joining me today. This interview has been oh so great. I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.

Alyssa O'Brien: Thank you so much, Mitch. It's been a pleasure being here and I'm very grateful for you inviting me in for this episode.

Mitch Free: If you enjoyed our chat with Alyssa as much as I did, please subscribe to our channel where you will find many more interesting interviews. Just like this one. To learn more about OSG and their HY-PRO CARB VGM series, check out www.mscdirect.com/osg. See you next time.

Narrator: Want more insights and ideas to improve the efficiency and productivity of your operations? Check out the Tooling Up video playlist to hear tips that can take your company to the next level. And subscribe to our channel so you won't miss out.