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.
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.
Vertical machining centers with advanced features and functions are earning their stripes as more productive members of machine shops’ CNC equipment arsenal.
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.
FANUC has made real one of the promises of Industry 4.0, that of predictive maintenance for factory equipment, with its Zero Down Time IoT solution. ZDT can be applied to any of FANUC’s robotic arms and their peripherals.
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.
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.
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.
When Desktop Metal introduced its “office-friendly” Studio metal prototype printer earlier this year, the company renewed attention on the issue of safer materials for binder jetting, an additive manufacturing method.
Sciaky Inc. (Chicago) has staked its claim to being the leading provider of metal 3D printing solutions for large parts approved for land, sea, air, and space applications, with the latest success being its Electron Beam Additive Manufacturing (EBAM) technology. Sciaky was called upon to manufacture a titanium variable ballast (VB) tank for a submarine manufacturer.
