The U.S. auto industry has been automated for decades. Production of cars and trucks is associated with large, hulking robots fenced off from human employees. Inside those fenced off areas, tasks such as welding are performed. The industry, though, is advancing on the automation front.
Sandvik has signed an agreement to acquire 67 percent of Chuzhou Yongpu Carbide Tools Co., Ltd, a China-based maker of solid round tools, with a call option to buy the remaining part in three years.
BLM GROUP USA has added more processing power to its LS5 and LC5 flat sheet laser cutters with the new option of a 10kW fiber laser source.
Horizontal machining center technology—a long-time mainstay of OEMs and Tier One contract manufacturers—has morphed into space efficient, versatile machining platforms that any high-mix job shop can benefit from.
Five-axis machining, once a novel and somewhat forbidding technology, has become routine in many shops. Meanwhile, some organizations are still hesitant to use it, largely due to programming concerns.
Low-carbon and medium-carbon steels form the backbone of virtually every shop’s operations in their general engineering applications and fabricated parts.
Horizontal machining centers (HMCs) are versatile four-axis and, increasingly, five-axis machine platforms that maximize processing of multi-sided large parts by minimizing part handling.
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.
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.
