Derek Korn Editor-in-Chief

Aerospace 9 Jun 2008

Striving To Be Partners, Not Shops

The two divisions within this business machine complex parts for the medical and aerospace industries. So in that sense they’re shops. However, in order to grow with their customers, they realized they had to be more than just providers of good parts. They needed to serve as their customers’ manufacturing partners.

Cutting Tools 1 Jun 2008

Learn From Your Mistakes

Admit it. There have been instances in which an operator’s mistake or a programming error turned one of your shop’s perfectly good cutters into a deformed creature.

Large Part Machining 29 May 2008

Attracted To A Better Way

Modular, magnetic workholding blocks have changed the way this shop approaches the machining of both large and small workpieces. The blocks’ portability allows them to be used on a variety of different machines. Their flexibility often eliminates the need to create custom fixtures.

CAD/CAM 10 May 2008

How PLM Helps Manage Global Supply Chains

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) can make it possible to capture information from all stages of manufacturing and production. Here are a few examples of how PLM can help optimize production processes that are spread around the world.

1 May 2008

Wind Turbine Windfall?

If your shop has big-part-machining capacity, then you likely already know about the opportunities the wind energy market presents. Here are a few ways to gage if this market will represent a steady stream of work in the coming years.

1 May 2008

A Tale Of Two Shows

Recent trade shows in Spain and in France displayed latest technologies for accurately machining extremely large components as well as really small ones.

Workforce Development 13 Apr 2008

Using Twin-Table Machines To Maximize Spindle Uptime

By integrating twin-table, bridge-style machining centers, this shop virtually eliminates spindle downtime during job chang-eovers. An operator can safely set up a new job on a table located outside the machine's workzone while the machine mills a workpiece fixtured on the other table.

2 Apr 2008

Elegance In Simplicity

What generally attracts the Modern editors to visit a shop is the chance to profile some significantly new or fundamentally different approach to machining parts. Examples of such high-level efforts include the implementation of lean manufacturing concepts, the development of in-house training procedures or the adoption of an alternate machine tool platform.