Casting reliability reinforced at Lojac

Adding a new offering to a business that will be a game-changer for construction customers is excellent, but the last thing anyone wants is for its parts to crumble and repair costs to soar.

Kodi Klip—designed to make the intricate task of connecting rebar safer, faster and stronger—experienced two years of growing pains before Signicast stepped in to help.

Casting reliability reinforced at Lojac

Signicast played a pivotal role in helping LoJac, Kodi Klip's majority owner, transform this innovative reinforcing solution into a rock-solid success. 

For Tennessee brick-and-block construction manufacturer LoJac, leading the regional building industry with a 75% market share carries an expectation of reliability.

When the company discovered inventor Jon Kodi's "Kodi Klip", named Most Innovative Product at a World of Concrete expo in 2015, they were impressed.

Here was a hand-held, air-gun-like tool that, when triggered, automatically fastens a clip to intersecting rebar rods. This helped workers avoid the back-breaking, slow and injury-prone work of manual wire tying.

"There's an immediate wow factor, and people fully understand it. It's one of those innovations that can seriously change the construction world," says LoJac Chief Operating Officer Kellie Mires.

The company partnered with Kodi in March 2016. However, the early generations of tools produced faced a major problem with field failures.

"As soon as it hit the rebar, the nozzle simply fell apart," says Aroll Jones, Customer Sales Director for Kodi Klip. "It would be sent back in crumbled pieces."

By the time LoJac began managing the Kodi Klip business, the product was in its second generation, and LoJac saw first-hand how urgent the reliability issue was.

A solution-driven approach

Kevin Blair, LoJac's Equipment Director, says, "The original nozzle was machined aluminium, which was very brittle. We had to add a protector to it after assembly to prevent it from being damaged on rebar."

That increased the part count. And the repairs continued.

"We were repairing as many as 50 or 60 per month, and more than 80% were due to broken nozzles. You would complete a repair, send it back out, and a month and a half later it would return with another broken nozzle. You can't do that. It's bad for business, bad for the customer, and bad all round."

It became imperative for the company to resolve the quality issues before mass-producing a product that would carry the LoJac brand.

Converting to investment casting

Signicast had learned about the nozzle failures from its inventor, so when LoJac took over management of the business, a solution had already been proposed.

To address the strength issue, Signicast designed a carbon steel solution— a material far stronger than aluminium. "We also made it one piece rather than two separate pieces," Ellis says, giving the nozzle greater structural integrity in use. Finally, the new part would undergo investment casting rather than machining, resulting in a stronger and more reliable component.

However, the true test would take place in the field—and within LoJac's equipment shop.

Casting a product that lasts

"In six months, we've put around 300 into the field, and we have yet to have a nozzle failure," says Blair. "And as more are deployed and replace the older generation, repairs continue to decline."

Signicast's solution also provides another benefit: once tooling has been developed, future production runs can be carried out with total project automation, with just-in-time quantities and schedules prescribed by LoJac.

"Working with Signicast has made such a significant difference. We can finally tell the market, 'Yes, you can get it today. Yes, we know it will last,'" says Jones. "When the tool is finished and reaches the field, it is exactly what it needs to be and works as designed."