Cutting tool maker Shape-Master Tool Co. (Kirkland, IL) needed to expand its tool grinding capability beyond that of its conventional machines or run the risk of losing work to the competition.
There have been many process improvement trends in manufacturing over the decades, and none have had more significant ROI than machine monitoring. The increase in machine monitoring is owed in large part to the rise in popularity of the open and royalty-free interconnectivity standard MTConnect.
Many precision grinding machines on the market already offer their users near-perfect tolerances, leaving one to wonder: What’s next in grinding? But tool builders still have plenty of room to add valuable new improvements, machine shop owners say.
Metalworking fluids have never been the most glamourous part of manufacturing. That’s been reserved for areas such as additive manufacturing, where complete parts are printed from a digital file, one layer at a time. However, most manufacturing today still consists of parts being cut, shaved or otherwise machined.
Machine tool suppliers, builders, and distributors are adopting aggressive ways to support their customers’ efforts to improve productivity and profitability in especially trying economic times.
There will be more than one new machine introduced at IMTS 2006 that will be billed as a China beater, or as an India and rest-of-Asia beater, for that matter.
Many industries have been making parts with micron dimensions for some time, but in the last few years, the market for miniaturization has expanded. The demand is not only for small parts, but also for small complex features on larger parts. This is due chiefly to the switch to modules in which the functions of several parts or subsystems are not handled by a single complex unit.
Carl Zeiss Industrial Metrology (Maple Grove, MN) held a groundbreaking ceremony on Wednesday, Dec. 12, for its new facility in metro Detroit.
Waterjet systems are offering machine shops more productivity options with the latest high-speed cutting and improved software capabilities
Innovate, Integrate, Collaborate are more than just marketing keywords. A number of metrology and software companies I visited at IMTS are putting their development dollars to work in these areas and showing off the results.
