Titan Launches Machining Tutorial Website

Titan Gilroy of the “Titans of CNC” TV Show is building what promises to be a valuable resource for understanding both the basic points and the broader philosophy of CNC machining. His new Titans of CNC Academy website provides free access not just to episodes of the TV show, but also to brief tutorial videos aimed at teaching concepts ranging from the axes of motion on a machine tool to the impact of running at high feed rates. He says he aims for the site to be a resource for community colleges and other educational institutions preparing machining professionals, but I see the site as being just as useful for machine shops themselves that are performing their own formal or informal training of employees.

Certain companies are prominent on the site. Tutorial videos from Autodesk exist alongside the videos from the “Titans of CNC” team, and Haas Automation also gets significant play in the site’s contents. However, Mr. Gilroy’s promotion of the companies supporting his work does not detract from the applicability or the educational quality of the content, and in some cases—such as this discussion of ID clamping using an expansion clamp—it helps to know which company provided the tooling (Mitee Bite).

Access is free, but requires email registration. Thus, you need to register in order for the hyperlink in the preceding paragraph to work. Once you do register, here are some other videos on the site to check out:

• Live Tooling: The Ultimate Lathe Upgrade. A concise and clear description, brought home with video footage, of one of the most basic distinctions everyone new to CNC needs to grasp. Namely: What is milling, what is turning, and how does live tooling bring them together?
• Ain’t Nothing but a G10 Thing. Mr. Gilroy talks about a recurring production part his own machining business runs, a component of a desalinization system made of G10 composite. There is a lot in this little video—the nature of composites, diamond tooling, soft jaws, and even the significance of part cleaning and deburring.
• Learn How to Edge Find. The wobble of an edge finder and what it means is a point best taught by a hands-on machining instructor right at the machine tool, but this well-filmed video provides a very good alternative.
• Learn to Install a Vise. This one made me a little misty. I’ve worked in media about 24 years, so it has been at least that long since I’ve set up a vise. But I can remember when I tapped the vise with a mallet and watched the indicator in just this way.
• Learn Titan’s Fixture Strip Technique. For a simple part being machined in small-volume production quantities, Mr. Gilroy shows how he machines 36 pieces out of two strips of material in a single cycle on a VMC.
• Pushing CNC Machine Speeds to the Limit. Fast feed rates are counter to the habits and culture of many shops. In this video, Mr. Gilroy makes the economic case for cutting at higher rates, while also providing a sense of how he tries to encourage a culture of fast cutting in his shop.