Demand for machining titanium for aerospace applications won’t abate any time soon. It is driving OEMs and the supply chain in the commercial airplane market to find ways to dramatically increase machining output. Whatever date you pick from now until 2030, there’s a sufficient backlog of commercial airliners for both structural and jet engine applications to keep spindles humming around the clock cutting titanium.
Even though it’s been around since the 1950s, when engineering-grade resins were first introduced, many manufacturers still are not familiar with the many benefits that metal-to-plastic conversion provides.
Micro components continue to shrink in size, demanding ever-greater precision and improved handling of parts with sub-micron-sized features. New approaches in micro machining technology include higher-precision systems from traditional micro machining developers, as well as techniques using additive manufacturing processes and semiconductor wafer-scale technology on the smallest of micro parts.
When you walk into the Redeye On Demand facility in Eden Prairie, MN, you enter into one version of the factory of the future. There you will see a bank of 100 high-end Fortus fused-deposition modeling (FDM) machines from Stratasys that provide the capacity to build real, functional parts with production-grade thermoplastics directly from CAD data.
Overall, there are two overriding customer needs: reducing cycle time and machine downtime. They want higher feed rates and depth of cut for greater metal removal.
Glenn Bridgman describes the difference between his shop’s manual grinders and its newest state-of-the-art CNC ID/OD grinder, a Studer CT960 OD/ID from United Grinding (Miamisburg, OH), as “feel vs. facts.” Bridgman, president of Bridge Tool & Die (Buckley, MI), believes that manual grinding is a somewhat personal operation.
Machine tool orders fell slightly on a monthly basis in July but posted a solid gain compared with a year earlier.
Named the next phase in the digitization of the manufacturing sector by McKinsey & Company, Industry 4.0 is sweeping through manufacturing—combining connectivity with computational power and data for unparalleled capabilities. Here are three ways Industry 4.0 is forcing manufacturers to rethink one key metric: their lead times.
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.
Industry analyst firm SmarTech Publishing has just issued a new report that examines the current market for automotive additive manufacturing market including prototyping and tooling applications while focusing specifically on production of final parts.
