In the early 1940s, mass-production ammunition manufacturing systems were complex assembly lines of crank presses, leather-belt driven lathes, batch processing, and loose tolerances. Quality was literally “inspected into the product” by humans sorting through all the finished cartridges, gauging and measuring to determine if a given part was “within spec” and then discarding the ones that fell outside of the established ranges. Sixty five years later, by 2007, this antiquated manufacturing process…….was exactly the same.

In 2008 the US Army commissioned Setpoint Systems to look at the entire process of case manufacturing from a whole new perspective. Utilizing lean manufacturing principles and over 20 years of automation experience, Setpoint Systems developed an automated case manufacturing system that has finally ushered the ancient art of case forming into the 21st century. By combining key principles of renowned lean manufacturing principles with our extensive automation experience in aerospace, automotive, and medical industries, Setpoint Systems has now set the bar to an unprecedented level for precision case manufacturing. And not only are the cases that come out of the Setpoint system more precise and consistent, they’re cheaper to make too. And the benefits don’t stop there.

By design, the case line equipment is able to produce parts at whatever rate of demand that the market currently dictates. This allows you to quickly eliminate all those nasty hidden inventory costs and the space required to store it. Think of it as “Just In Time Ammo”.

The Setpoint case forming system is controlled with industrial Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), consequently, modifications to processing parameters such as changing pocket depth, head diameter, and/or overall length (OAL) of the cases can be achieved with mere computer key strokes rather than specialty tools, skilled labor, and a week of down time. Sounds more like a true 21st century process now, doesn’t it?

By integrating all the case forming processes into one machine, a whole litany of product inspections are also able to be integrated into the process. This eliminates the need for human inspections after the processes are complete, and consequently provides a level of quality assurance never before realized in the industry. Because these automated inspections are completed in real-time, during the process, the chance of passing inferior parts downstream is virtually eliminated. Setpoint’s proprietary in-process tracking logic ensures that every part meets or exceeds quality standards after each step of the process, and that non-conforming material is immediately recognized and properly dispositioned out of the system. The end result is a higher level of quality and consistency and therefore, more cost effective manufacturing.

Benefits of Setpoint Ammunition Manufacturing Equipment

Throughout the engineering and design process, Setpoint thoroughly examined every step of the legacy case forming process. Each individual sub-process was completely dissected and examined in great detail. The team was looking for ways to improve on the existing methods, as well as ways to integrate all of the processes together in a single-part flow process. The results of this effort were all of the aforementioned process enhancements, as well as a dramatic decrease in the amount of space required for a case line system.
Some of the specific improvements of the Setpoint case forming system worth noting are:

• Reduced scrap production
• Reduced labor requirements
• Reduced inventory expensesFinished Brass Cases
• Increase in product quality
• 70% reduction in floor space requirements
• Increased equipment up time
• Increased flexibility in production and planning
• 3 washes eliminated
• 97% reduction of manual transportation
• In-process automated quality inspection

Setpoint has taken lessons learned from the LCAAP project and refined each process for our second generation case manufacturing equipment, to consistently manufacture brass cartridge cases to an even higher quality standard than current Mil-Std.  In addition to case manufacturing, Setpoint has taken the time to understand and refine the process for taking the finished case to fully loaded ammunition in the development of the ammo primer and ammo loader.  Now you can set up your ammunition production from start to finish with Setpoint.