Mar 17, 2014
From its historic home in Minsk, Amkodor Holding is fast becoming a leading exporter of world-class off-highway equipment – all powered by investment in modern new technologies and equipment – and Total Gear Solutions from Gleason.
85 years ago Amkodor was started in Minsk as a simple workshop with primitive equipment for the construction of beds and sleds, children’s bicycles, toys and furniture made of wicker. Today, Amkodor Holding is a one of the Republic of Belarus’ leading manufacturers of road construction, utilities, snow removal, airport, timber, agricultural and other specialized machinery and equipment, employing 6,000 people in 14 different enterprises. Suffice to say, there’s nothing ‘primitive’ today about the company’s capabilities, and the technologies it employs. Amkodor has launched a major expansion and modernization effort that company officials say will help expand its presence as a major equipment exporter of some 90 different equipment models to 30 countries worldwide. By 2020, Amkodor is planning to develop, manufacture, test, and produce over 50 additional models – all built to, and completely compliant with, world-class quality standards.
A strategy of investment.
Amkodor’s Dormash plant in Minsk produces all the gears, pinion-shafts, and spline shafts that are used in the drive axles, transfer gearboxes and planetary reduction gearboxes for Amkodor’s many products. Amkodor officials say that the development and production of high-quality gears, gear drives and gear boxes for a new generation of world-class road construction and special-purpose machinery can only be performed through use of advanced gear production technologies, state-of-art process equipment, and high-performance cutting tools. According to Amkodor, these objectives will be achieved with the help of the new Gleason gear production equipment and cutting tools at the Dormash plant. For the production of spur and helical gears, Gleason technologies already at work include a P 350 CNC gear cutting machine, a P 500 S CNC gear shaping machine, and a P 90 EL CNC spline cutting machine. For the production of spiral and straight bevel gears, a complete system of Gleason technologies will soon be up and running: a Gleason Phoenix® II 600HC bevel gear cutting machine, as well as Gleason’s BPG blade grinding and profiling machine, and model CB cutter head building and inspection machine.
Successful testing and development.
While these new Gleason bevel gear production machines are not yet installed, Amkodor has already teamed with Gleason to begin to benefit from the powerful capabilities these machines can deliver when combined with Gleason’s proprietary CAGE™ and G-AGE™ bevel gear design and inspection software. In February, 2013, Amkodor managers journeyed to The Gleason Works in Rochester, NY USA for machine acceptance. In the course of preliminary acceptance, sets of spiral and straight bevel gears for main real axle drives were designed with the help of Gleason CAGE and G-AGE software, and then produced using their new Gleason Phoenix® II 600HC. Inspections of precision parameters of these gears confirmed that the highest quality was achieved– all with a fraction of the time-consuming trial and error typical of the new bevel gear development process. Amkodor officials conclude that, as a result of the application of new Gleason equipment at the Dormash plant, the company now is well positioned to improve the quality and reliability of its gears – and help meet its ambitious global export objectives.
