Rod Zimmerman of cutting tool manufacturer Iscar Metals lives in a pleasant green zone in a Fort Worth suburb. Yet within a half mile of his home, an oil company has sunk a vertical hole 7,500′ (2,286 m) deep, from which it has splayed nine lateral lines, each going about half a mile.
I get to observe, read about or write on manufacturing trends nearly every day. Around this time of year (mid-December), lots of manufacturing Top 10 Trends lists are published. I was curious about how many of these trends SME Media has covered in the last year and plans to cover in 2019.
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.
Nobody knows just yet how the auto industry will adopt 3D printing. But Desktop Metal Inc. (Burlington, MA) is in a better position than most to make an educated guess.
In a small town in northwestern Wisconsin, a dedicated group of engineers, designers, and machinists are working with a visionary management team on a concept that could have a revolutionary effect on general aviation and impact other forms of flight.
For certain machining applications, off-the-shelf cutters come up short. Here’s how to increase productivity, reduce costs, and improve part quality with a custom cutting tool solution.
There is a lot of promise in the coming adoption of Model-Based Definition (MBD) in industry. MBD is the practice of attaching useful information to a 3D CAD model, such as tolerances or material properties. This should be especially good news for manufacturing engineers.
It’s not too difficult to understand the importance of machining aluminum for aerospace applications. High volumes of aluminum are used, principally for structural components.
According to McNamara, director of sales for Doosan Machine Tools America (Pine Brook, NJ), the most important tools in getting customers to move into five-axis machining are features within the control that make it simple to create, understand and prove out machining programs.
