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Sustaining a Lean Culture

Earlier this year, at the 21st annual Shingo Prize conference awards ceremony, Autoliv Americas’ airbag module facility in Ogden, UT, was awarded The Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence. This was the second Shingo Prize won by the Autoliv Ogden Airbag Assembly (AOA) plant.

Lean Efforts Capture the Shingo

A subsidiary of HNI Corp. (Mustacine, IA), the second-largest manufacturer of office furniture in North America, Hearth & Home Technologies (HHT; Mt. Pleasant, IA) manufactures sheetmetal fireplaces (both wood and gas-burning), vent pipe, and fireplace accessories. The company has four manufacturing facilities.

Programming CMMs

Off-line programming software tools for CMMs allow manufacturers to increase measurement capacity and throughput by programming CMMs, probes, and fixtures before parts are made.

What’s the Connection?

A lot of attention is paid to the “business end” of CNC toolholders–the part that actually holds the tool.

Tooling and Workholding Systems

“We are developing solutions for power workholding such as hydraulic swing clamps and block clamps, because the real estate on a fixture is so valuable,” says Jason Betz, product specialist for Carr Lane Roemheld (St. Louis). “This pushes the use of smaller workholding components as much as possible because the more parts on the fixture the greater the productivity.”

Maybe it’s Time to Try Some ‘Swiss Cheese’

These days the most important theme in superabrasive grinding wheel development isn’t the abrasive, it’s the bond. The diamond or CBN grains do the cutting, but the bond plays a decisive role in exposing the grains to the workpiece and enabling coolant to remove heat.

To U-Shape or Not to U-Shape?

Batch and queue is the hallmark of a mass production system. Parts are processed, moved in large quantities to the next process, wait for their turn, are processed, and moved as a batch to the next process.

The Aerospace Precision-Machining Race

That huge backlog of aircraft being recorded by the global giants Boeing and Airbus, along with a lengthening list of regional aircraft, is stretching the supply chain’s capabilities to machine the newest difficult-to-machine materials.

Pumping Up CNC Productivity

To compete in the fast-paced world of manufacturing, machinists look for no-compromise machine controls offering fast, precision programming of machine tools. The latest CNC systems from machine control developers include a new dual-function milling and turning control and several updated controls with embedded software routines that can significantly speed up CNC programming.