How Indexable Tools Keep Their Edge April 22, 2020 Sales figures don’t lie: indexable cutting tools—featuring removable cutting tips called inserts—are a smash hit with machine shops.
Remote Monitoring Reveals How to Boost Uptime on Laser Machines April 27, 2020 East Iowa Machine Co. (EIMCo) in Farley, Iowa, is a full-service machine and fabrication shop. It is an ISO 9001:2015 certified manufacturing company, employing about 150 people on three shifts at its single 130,000 ft2 (12,077 m3) location, and converts raw metals into finished component parts and assemblies using a wide variety of CNC equipment and state-of-the-art manufacturing processes.
Live Tooling: Basic Concepts, Recent Developments April 24, 2020 Live tooling, as the name implies, is driven by the CNC and the turrets of various spindle and powered sub-spindle configurations on CNC lathes.
Adapting Metal Cutting to Higher Power, Higher-Speed Lasers October 25, 2019 Using lasers to cut metal, especially sheet metal or tubes, continues to show its value. The market is becoming dominated by the newer solid-state fiber laser over its CO2 gas rival. Fiber’s advantages in ease of operation, packaging and efficiency are clear.
Lightweighting’s New Phase September 3, 2019 Earlier this decade, the auto industry moved to lighten cars and trucks. It was supposed to be a competition between steel, long the dominant vehicle material, and aluminum. The latter got a boost when Ford Motor Co., Dearborn, Mich., bet big on aluminum, making aluminum bodies for its F-150 and Super Duty pickups.
Putting Machinery on a Strong Fitness Plan Starts with Real-Time Monitoring August 16, 2019 Having a plan for maintaining and improving the performance and reliability of every machine on a shop floor is vital to manufacturing operations. Reliable machines make short-notice production runs possible. And the more flexible manufacturers are, the more new customers they’ll attract.
Open Mind Looks Back At 25 Years, and to the Future August 15, 2019 Twenty years ago, Open Mind first introduced CAM software capabilities to address five-axis machining in the mold and die industry and other general applications. Since that time five-axis technology has grown disproportionately larger when compared to the increase in overall manufacturing growth.
Robot Company Creates Industry 4.0-Friendly Software August 2, 2019 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.
Software: Making In-House Apps with Low-Code, No-Code Platforms October 4, 2019 Banking on the premise that sometimes the best ideas for solving problems come from the ground up, manufacturers are adopting no-code and low-code programming platforms to let employees solve problems by building their own custom apps.
Laser Scanners Demand Attention as Technology Improves October 7, 2019 Metrology-grade laser scanners are expanding their range of applications. New users are finding the main attractions of laser scanners—speed and ease of use. What prevented more widespread use in the past were laser scanners’ perceived tradeoffs. Using one usually meant sacrificing accuracy or working with noisy data.