Like most auto manufacturers, NASCAR race teams are motivated to make vehicle parts better, cheaper and faster. Hundreds of the leading Fortune 500 brands are highly visible on the evocative vehicle paint schemes, pointing to continued healthy investment in the sport.
Eaton Vehicle Group’s new eVaptive electronically controlled fuel tank vapor-venting system offers engineers flexibility never before possible in designing fuel systems. Designing a vehicle’s fuel and vapor-venting system is no easy task, despite the fact that much of the technology involved is not overly complex.
Konrad Lorenz won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1973 for his experiments with animal behavior. Lorenz discovered the principle of imprinting, where a bond is formed between a newborn animal and a caregiver. This is the mechanism where an auditory or visual stimulus is used to induce the young to follow its parents.
Drilling advancements have spurred the evolution of oil and gas operations from simplistic single-well pad fields to more complex multi-well pads. Today, many producers are using fracking and lateral drilling techniques to place 10 or more wells on one pad.
Erik Anderson, president and CEO of Basin Precision Machining LLC, has determined that setups are the root of all evil when it comes to manufacturing productivity. They cause part variations, downtime, and high-percentage scrap rates.
If you’ve ever seen industrial wind turbine components on the back of a flatbed truck rolling down the highway, you have a good idea of what a large, heavy, difficult-to-handle workpiece is. For example, with a single blade on the GE 1.5 mW turbine being almost as long as a football field, the entire blade assembly weighs about the same as 36 small cars.
At the Nirvana Machine Shop on planet Perfection, every workpiece is clamped to a custom-built fixture mounted on a dedicated machine tool. Each workpiece is dimensionally identical to the one before and the one after. All the fixtures are totally automatic—instantly positioning, clamping, machining, inspecting, and releasing the part with the ultimate precision.
With the number of offline and in-process toolsetting options on the rise, developing a way to efficiently utilize this technology can be confusing. Which presetter should we buy? What about the software that’s so often part of these systems—do we really need it?
Do you have what it takes to raise your milling productivity to the next level? In addition to the requisite know-how, you need cutters and machine tools that will allow you to employ milling techniques that exceed what’s normally possible. Aided by the right hardware, you may soon be performing feats like pushing your feed rates to new highs and cutting harder materials than ever before.
If you’re looking for new solutions to tooling and workholding challenges, IMTS was a great place to start. The bi-annual trade show, held this past September in Chicago, allowed shops to browse for the “latest and greatest” technologies.