Precision as a principle
Precision can be measured not only in tolerances, contours and processes. It must be lived out every day, with high-accuracy work, a passion for detail and an uncompromising determination to get everything exactly right, as a talk with the specialists at WSK makes clear.
glückauf (“glückauf” is the GMH Gruppe employee newspaper): Mr. Drechsler and Mr. Kocur, are you always careful to apply the highest precision in your work?
Steffen Drechsler: Very much so! Our components may be as long as 12 metres, but we still need the accuracy of a watchmaker during production.
Michael Kocur: Let’s have a look at a crankshaft with a diameter of 450 millimetres. In these 450 millimetres, we can allow a tolerance of only four millimetres. On a shaft of 12 metres length, the lateral runout must not be more than 0.005 millimetres. And this is our normal, everyday business.
glückauf: WSK is a short-run specialist. What does that mean for your daily work?
Drechsler: It means that we are working every day on a different type of shaft. Thirty a year of the same model is a large production run for us.
Kocur: The exacting demands of our customers, the daily re-equipping of our workplace, ever new demands for tolerances and surface finishes – the precision of the technology used is not enough on its own, a human passion for perfection has to be added. Our employees must live out this precision – and that’s exactly what they do.
Wildauer Schmiede- und Kurbelwellentechnik
Our crankshafts have to withstand not only maximum stresses, they also have to be produced to accuracies of a few hundredths of a millimetre. In close cooperation with Schmiedewerke Gröditz, we cover the complete value chain, from the steelmaking, via the forging process, up to and including ready-to-install crank and eccentric shafts.
Michael Kocur
Michael Kocur is a marking scribe, polisher and contour cleaner at WSK. He learned his trade as a machine technician at the company in 1984 and has now worked at WSK for 35 years. His job is fine and finish machining, and he’s responsible, among other things, for polishing the crankshafts. He accepts no ifs and buts where precision is concerned: “Precision is what the customer demands. We supply it.”