Simple Solutions That Work! Issue 18

13 HOW TO ISSUE Why To & How To— Clean Your Furnace It may also be that there are few things more important than keeping your furnace clean as it relates to your operation’s profitability. So, let’s take a closer look, not only at the “how to,” but at the “why to” clean your furnace and your furnace wells regularly. We will see that there are some aspects of this that will certainly vary from foundry to foundry, but in all cases, there are principles that will drive improvement in your business performance if you adhere to them. Your two largest costs in this business are raw material and energy. Good cleaning practices will provide a significant increase in throughput while reducing the energy required. These outcomes can be measured and will correlate directly with your income statement each month. What might be different, and what is the same In every foundry environment, there are different factors that will impact the operational performance, and there are principles that when followed will always result in improvement. Some of the primary factors include: 1. Raw material you are melting 2. Metal temperature 3. Amount of flow generated from your circulation pump 4. Burner size and positioning 5. Furnace configuration and dimensions 6. Metal depth in the furnace 7. Flux types 8. Refractory material This is not an exhaustive list, but enough to demonstrate that no Continued on next page JEFF KELLER CEO Molten Metal Equipment Innovations ARTICLE TAKEAWAYS: • Furnace cleaning is a necessary investment • Skimping on doing it the right way will cost you • If you measure it, you can improve it T here is a stigma in the foundry business that cleaning your furnace should make you the star of the show “Dirty Jobs.” It’s not fun, it’s always hot and it can indeed be dirty! two furnace environments are the same and so outcomes will always vary. That said, attention to basic principles will yield significant improvements. We all know that what we don’t measure, we can’t improve. Specifically, if we measure gas usage, dross weight, and furnace throughput, we can drive significant operational performance improvements that will increase profitability. When to clean your furnace and how to do it There is a best practice in the industry that requires cleaning your charge and pump wells once per shift, every shift, every day. This forces a practice that has every operator owning the process on their shift and avoids having this “burden” fall only on certain people on certain shifts, which will all but ensure it doesn’t get done. It also prevents having dross build up to the point that it becomes much more difficult to manage further lessening the likelihood that it gets done and eventually causing premature breakage of pump parts and reduced operational performance. Like so many manufacturing best practices, it takes discipline and leadership by example. If you then help your employees see the link between doing the cleaning frequently and the improved performance it produces, they will want to do it. People want to feel like they are making a positive impact on the operation, and this is a great way to do it. Consider adding a visual measure