Motor City Mojo

While Columbus and Indianapolis certainly have their charms—as does Cincinnati, where Modern Machine Shop is based—there’s something particularly fitting about the years when Gear Expo is located in Detroit: The Motor City. That was definitely the case Oct. 20-22 at the Cobo Center, where the American Gear Manufacturers Association (AGMA) hosted Gear Expo 2015, which was co-located with the ASM Heat Treating Society’s Conference & Exposition.

In addition to touring the show floor—the AGMA reports at least a 7-percent surge in attendance over the last Gear Expo—visitors took advantage of educational sessions at the Solutions Center about scroll-free turning (Emag), generating grinding (Kapp Niles), grinding automotive gears (Gleason) and gear machining on multitasking machines (DMG MORI), among many other topics.

Trends that I detected include the continued advancement of scudding (GMTA/Star SU) and skiving (Gleason, Mitsubishi, etc.), new service/maintenance packages (“repowering” machine tools by Koepfer, for instance, and a new spindle rebuild program from Cincinnati Gearing Systems) and gear-specific automation systems from companies such as ABB. Go here for a slideshow of the event.