EDMs Take a Big Step Up To Unattended Eroding September 27, 2018 For the most part, EDMing is an unattended, or at least lightly-attended process. Unlike CNC lathes and machining centers, where a broken cutter during the night can make for a truly bad morning, sinking a mold cavity or cutting a trim die requires little in the way of babysitting—why wouldn’t you let the machine run on its own after everyone’s gone home for the day?
Medical Machining Shifts Into High Gear—With a Laser Assist July 5, 2018 Constant refinement of medical machining from tooling design to finished product requires not only the ability to handle a broad range of plastic and metal materials but also to achieve predictable results—particularly in the face of strict regulations.
CMMs Grow Their Niche August 30, 2018 For CMMs, the good times continue to roll. “One of the surprising things that has happened in just the last three to four years is the sheer volume of CMMs that we are shipping,” said Angus Taylor, president of Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence, North America (North Kingstown, RI). “The market seems to be really exploding.”
Open-Systems Approach to PLM Gives Digital Transformation Advantages July 2, 2018 Manufacturers face the ongoing challenges of managing exponential product complexity, staying competitive, and avoiding disruption. For many of them that leads to the notion of digital transformation, but they are not always sure how to get started.
XR Drives Aerospace Excellence at Boeing July 23, 2018 Extended reality (XR) has burst onto the scene in the last few years, offering us amazing visualization possibilities in myriad application areas along the aerospace supply chain. While there has been explosive growth in this space of late, there is actually a very rich history between XR technologies, aerospace and Boeing.
Take Control at IMTS 2018 August 8, 2018 Most anyone attending IMTS 2018 is well aware that machine tools are the lifeblood of virtually any manufacturing company. Without lathes and machining centers, parts don’t get made, barstock collects dust on the shelf, and machinists…they’d have nothing to do.
Long Established, AR Making Headway in Design, Production and Maintenance May 21, 2018 Delta Sigma started thinking about augmented reality (AR) in 2005. By January 2008, the company, which designs and builds custom machinery to automate manufacturing and assembly processes for aircraft production, made its first installation on the F-22 vertical stabilizer.
Some firms accept arrival of Age of AI, seize the day April 4, 2018 Remember the boy with endless learning capacities in the 2001 film “AI Artificial Intelligence”? He’s quickly coming to life. Today, AI is no longer fictional; it’s reality.
Better Together: Machinists and Programmers April 27, 2018 Spend enough time on shop floors and you’ll learn about the two different groups of skilled workers that reside there. On one side are the old-school machinists—skilled craftspeople who use their hands, eyes and ears to guide machine tools. On the other side are the programmers and engineers.
When it Comes to Simulation Software, Seeing is Believing October 25, 2018 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.