More and more manufacturers are seeing productivity as a crucial factor to their business success. In the meantime, business models are changing from the large quantities and few variants to small quantities with frequently changed variants. This change requires high flexibility during production.
Makers of workholding devices face a moving target. The machine tools they work with are changing. There’s more high-speed machining. More high-feed machining. More multi-axis machines. New uses of coolant to reduce temperatures during cutting operations.
Machine tool orders fell slightly on a monthly basis in July but posted a solid gain compared with a year earlier.
May U.S. cutting tool consumption totaled $215.13 million, according to the U.S. Cutting Tool Institute (USCTI) and AMT—The Association For Manufacturing Technology.
GE Appliances (GEA) has been designing and manufacturing consumer appliances for over 125 years. The iconic brand, headquartered in Louisville, KY, employs nearly 6000 people, a number that rose to 12,000 employed globally after its acquisition by Haier, making the company part of the largest appliance manufacturer in the world.
It’s the machine tool acronym you never bother to put into words: CNC. And much of the time it’s probably OK to view your “computer numerical control” as a black box doing magic. But if you’re struggling with high-speed machining, need better surface finishes or higher accuracy, have training and retention problems, or want a better handle on your production efficiency, the answer just might be the latest iterations of those three little letters.
Despite the addition of more than 750,000 CNC mills in the past 15 years in the US, CNC machining job shops often hover at the bottom of the totem pole, where there’s little room for error as most bids are won by a 1–2% price variance.
In the early days at CNC Software, we saw that our Mastercam CAD/CAM system was only part of a larger manufacturing solution and that an open architecture foundation could allow seamless data communication with complementary devices and systems across the shop floor.
Sunnen Products Company has acquired BTA Heller Incorporated, a US-based manufacturer of deep hole tooling and systems for primary hole generation. This move aims to expand Sunnen’s honing expertise to include tooling for initial hole creation and other complementary bore sizing and finishing processes.
Machine tool orders posted mixed results in November, slipping a bit on a monthly basis while recording a solid gain compared with a year earlier, according to a monthly report by the Association for Manufacturing Technology (McLean, VA).
