At Temescal Canyon High School in Lake Elsinore, Calif., I’m fortunate to work in a district that is supportive of career-oriented programs.
As one of the oldest and most prestigious research-lead universities in Europe, KU Leuven is an institution that is always seeking to innovate and stay on top of the latest trends and technologies. When it comes to manufacturing, the institution is an advocate of additive processes and dedicates a research group to the technology.
Solid-carbide round tools have seemingly been around forever; before them, high-speed steel (HSS) tools ruled the roost, and after them a growing selection of alternative processes like indexables, EDM, waterjet and now additive manufacturing emerged as competition.
After three years of work, military researchers are near the end of a project to find a faster, cheaper way to make tools for large aerospace parts like skins for wings and fuselages.
Swiss-style machine tools can be a good choice for making complex parts. On the downside, however, Swiss machining itself has a reputation of being complex—and, therefore, more difficult to master than standard machining.
Adaptive Milling. Dynamic Motion. hyperMILL. Profit Milling. VoluMill. Waveform machining. If you’re one of the lucky people who machines parts for a living, chances are about 50-50 that you’re using one of these or a comparable high-performance programming technology.
For machine shops in a competitive global marketplace, keeping spindles running and making product is the only way to stay in business. Still, adding a new piece of equipment, even with the promise of improving the efficiency of your existing ones, may be a difficult sell to management.
Marshall Aerospace and Defence Group is now using 3D printing from Stratasys to manufacture flight-ready parts for several of its military, civil and business aircraft—while producing specific ground-running equipment at a lower cost than aluminum alternatives.
The state of manufacturing is always a combination of tried and true methods; improvements (sometimes dramatic) in traditional processes; and brand new technology few people even conceived of a few years ago.
In a perfect CNC world, the first part is always a good one. There’s no need for extra blanks or barstock. Setup times are only as long as is needed to swap out a few tools and load a new program. There’s never a crash, never the need to reprogram an inefficient bit of code. The operator just pushes the green button and out pops a finished workpiece minutes or hours later.
