Established in 1952

Page: 4090

Micro Surface Engineering, Inc. is an over 56-year-old, fully integrated, family owned and managed, California Corporation. We are located in the central manufacturing district of Los Angeles, California. The 35,000 square feet of industrial buildings that comprise our facilities are family owned.

We can provide our customers with engineering assistance based on over 50 years of experience in precision manufacturing and metrology. Our company has awesome capabilities, and we are small enough to provide personal service. This broad array of experience includes precision engineering, kinematic couplings, bearing technology, the metallurgy of balls and rollers, ball sizing and dimensional metrology.

Our Bal-tec™ division is one of the top six precision ball manufacturers in the United States. Our goal is to satisfy the niche market for custom made precision balls, cylinders and associated products.

The basis of our business is our unique ability to quickly manufacture custom made precision and ultra precision spheres and cylinders and a myriad of modified forms needed by industry.

Many of these components are modified with flats, holes, and threads; or are attached to other devices. We have developed extensive machining, grinding, welding and E.D.M. capabilities. Our precision ball making capacity extends from subminiature balls in the .005-inch diameter range to monsters that are over 17 inches in diameter and weigh over one thousand pounds.

We have state of the art C.N.C. Vertical Machining Centers up to 50 inches. We have state of the art C.N.C. turning centers up to 36 inches in diameter. These machines are D.N.C. and are programmed and controlled from our in house C.A.D.- C.A.M. computer system.

Our E.D.M. (Electrical Discharge Machining) department includes six die sinking machines. We have one horizontal E.D.M. machine with a 60-inch capacity. We have four Fast Hole E.D.M. Drilling machines and two state of the art Wire-Cutting E.D.M. machines. We have one very small hole drilling machine that can theoretically go down to 0.002 inch diameter. We have one bath tub size machine and one with a vertical free board of over three feet.

Our cylindrical grinding equipment includes two Studder and three Tshuden machines as well as B & S and Landis Universals. The center less grinding capacity includes Cincinnati and Landis machines. Our internal grinding capability includes Studder, Bryant and Healed machines. Our Blanchard grinding capability for flat surfaces, includes 42 inch, 36 inch and 16 inch capacity machines. The plane surface grinding includes two mammoth 48-inch machines and numerous 30-inch, 24-inch, 18-inch, 12-inch and two 5x10 inch super accurate Taft Pierce machines.

We operate a complete lapping department for flat, parallel, cylindrical and spherical parts. This department has the capacity to hold gage block tolerances in all of these geometries.

We have three slicing and dicing machines for cubing up hard brittle materials as the first step in producing balls.

Our Jig Boring capacity extends from our gigantic P & W #3 E-C.N.C. machine down to the very petite #1A-S.I.P. We have a completely equipped # 3 Moore jig grinding machine with all of tooling, air spindles from 40 to 120 thousand RPM and the Ultra Precise rotary table with extensions, plus the large size plate with everything.

To round out our machining capacity, we have more than 100 conventional chip making machines that include: vertical and horizontal milling machines, Harding and Casanova Lathes, broach, vertical and horizontal shapers and drilling machines. We have the capacity to do the special problem jobs all within our own facilities.

Our complete in house tool and cutter grinding facility gives us immediate access to sharp accurate tools. This department includes a fully tooled #2 Cincinnati T & C grinder, a Cincinnati Monoset, a tap grinding facility, full drill sharpening capabilities and all of the off hand grinders needed.

Our welding capabilities include A.C. and D.C. arc, MIG, projection, resistance and capacitance discharge, and TIG. We can do Brazing by torch, atmosphere protected furnace, and induction brazing with reduction and/or a protective environment.

Our de-burring and polishing department includes belt and disk sanding; vapor blasting, vibratory finishing and back stand polishing machines.

Our inspection and calibration capabilities place us in the top ten facilities in the world. We have six Moore measuring machines from the giant #22-32, four axis laser machine down through the spectrum of the M4 and the #3 to the small but exquisite #1 ½.

Our roundness measuring capabilities include four Talyronds, two Indironds and two Federal Air Bearing machines. Some of these machines have total error budgets in the plus or minus one microinch range (+ or - 25 nanometers). For the ultimate in sphericity measurement we have developed a research instrument that has the capability of determining sphericity on the order of plus or minus one nanometer, which is one twenty fifth of one microinch. See our paper "Measuring Sphericity" on this web site.

For surface texture evaluation we have several microinteferometers including the Johansson Multimi, multibeam microinterferometer, three Zeiss Black Boxes, and a laboratory Proficorder. These instruments give us the ability to resolve surface quality well below one tenth of one microinch Ra.

Our metallurgy lab includes two metallurgical microscopes, two macro graphs, 60,000 pound and 6,000 pound universal tensile compression testing machines, a low capacity universal tensile and compression testing machine, a Sharpy and Izode impact test machine, liquid cooled belt and disk sanding machines, three Buhler metallurgical polishing stations, a Leitz Miniload setup for Vickers-micro-hardness test, a Leitz Miniload setup for Knoop micro-hardness test. We have a Wilson 4JR Rockwell hardness test machine, a Kentall superficial hardness test machine, a Steel City Brinell hardness test machine, hydraulic presses, specimen mounting presses, a liquid cooled Buhler abrasive cut off saw, a Buhler liquid cooled diamond cutoff saw and all of the miscellaneous equipment needed to operate a full capability metallurgy lab.

Our extremely well equipped main ball-grinding department is temperature controlled at 68 degrees Fahrenheit ( 20 degrees Celsius ). This eliminates the size measuring problems associated with temperature and greatly improves our delivery by eliminating the soaking time required to thermally equilibrate the balls for measurement.

This department is augmented by our large ball grinding department for producing balls from 1.5 inches to 17 inches in diameter, our fine precision ball grinding department for grade 5 and grade 10 balls and our ultra precise ball grinding department is set up for our ultimate quality balls. It is located in a temperature controlled clean room.

For producing large diameter and exotic material, we have extensive CNC turning capacity.

One of the newer additions is a C.N.C. ceramic machining and grinding center for all manner of ceramic ball modifications.

Most ball blanks are produced by cold heading individual spherical shapes from rolls of wire or cylindrical bar stock. We have 40 cold heading machines available for producing ball blanks from 1/8 inch to over 5/8 of an inch diameter.

Small quantities of larger diameter ball blanks are usually machined on one of our five highly automated C.N.C. turning centers.