Displaying 421-430 of 899 results for

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.

Since their introduction about 20 years ago, replaceable-tip drills have become increasingly accurate and cost-effective alternatives to solid carbide units.

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.

The bane of modern engineering is complexity. One promise of artificial intelligence and machine learning is helping engineers to use complex tools and harness vast data sets effectively.

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?

There is no real problem with threading a pipe. Most DIY types can do it in their workshop with hand tools, but when the pipe is 40′ long and ordered by the ton, you are in oil country. Pumping crude oil out of the ground requires drill pipe, casing, tool joints, tees, crosses, flanges, and couplings. All those items need to be machined. And that takes specialized workholding.

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.

No one can accuse cutting tool manufacturers of not trying every possible combination of coating, substrate, material and geometry in their quest to gain a competitive edge for their customers.

Digital manufacturing solutions with product lifecycle management (PLM) tools hold great potential for manufacturers to eventually fully unlock the promise of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

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.