Mike Lynch Founder and President

19 Oct 2011

Five CNC Myths and Misconceptions

Managers that wind up working in companies that use CNCs often start their careers in other areas. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, managers with limited shop experience can’t always understand what’s actually going on in the shop. Here are five frustration-causing miscues I’ve noticed between management and shop employees.

15 Sep 2011

What Is in Your Company Library?

People in need of information cannot be very productive. A company library can be a good source for general information.

24 Aug 2011

Targeting Individual Setup Tasks for Elimination

The goal is to get as close to achieving zero setup time as possible while justifying the costs of doing so. Here’s how you get there.

14 Jun 2011

Potentially Dangerous Control Panel Functions

Various control panel functions can lead to potential tool crashes. Look out for these three.

6 May 2011

Evaluating the Test Part Program

In February 2007, I wrote a column called “Trial Machining on a Sliding Headstock Turning Center” that addressed the complexity of running a good first workpiece on a sliding headstock lathe.

18 Apr 2011

Eliminate Variations for Repeated Tasks

The more often as task is repeated, the easier it is to justify improving it. If you seldom perform a task, it doesn’t make sense to target it for improvement. However, often-repeated tasks may comprise the greatest percentage of your time, so improving them can have a large and immediate impact on productivity.

21 Mar 2011

Making Sizing Adjustments

Instead of expensive tool life management systems, try using a custom macro.

15 Feb 2011

Synergy in the CNC Environment

CNC machine productivity is directly tied to the people who program, set up and run the machines. It also depends on support people, such as tool engineers, manufacturing engineers, tooling engineers, quality/inspection people and tool crib attendants. Everyone in the CNC environment has an impact on productivity.

17 Jan 2011

Monitoring Important Control Panel Functions

CNC machine operation panels have many buttons and switches that setup people and operators must know well. While managers need not know every button and switch, there are some control panel functions that they should know in order to judge whether important functions are set appropriately.

22 Dec 2010

A Y-Axis-Aligning Custom Macro

CNC lathes with live tooling capabilities can perform machining operations similar to those done on milling machines and eliminate secondary operations.

15 Nov 2010

Are There Variations with Your Cutting Tools?

If you have jobs that are repeated on a given CNC machine, you probably want to ensure that they can be run over and over again without machine downtime. Indeed, you probably want to consider your programs as “proven” to be secure in the notion that you can consistently run them at any time without problems.

Basics 18 Oct 2010

Maintaining a Log Book

Almost all CNC shops provide documentation to tell setup people and operators how to make setups and complete production runs. Each shop varies with regard to how this is handled and how specific the documentation is.