Mike Lynch Founder and President

1 May 1999

What Percentage Of Your Setup Time Is Waste?

One definition of waste is any lost time or money caused by disorganization, duplication of effort and misunderstandings. Most setup-reduction programs make eliminating waste a primary goal.

1 Apr 1999

Trial Cutting On Machining Centers

Sometimes you may be able to go ahead and machine the first part of a run on a machining center without having to take trial cuts. When tolerance bands are large, operators or setup people can afford to run the program with the confidence that the cuts will come out somewhere in their tolerance bands and the workpiece will not be scrapped.

CNC Tech Talks 1 Mar 1999

Which Is Faster, G00 or G01?

Special thanks to Kyle A. Thornley, Technical Instructor at GE Fanuc Automation, for explaining the principles described in this article.

CNC Tech Talks 5 Feb 1999

A Tool To Help With Jaw Boring

Machining soft jaws remains one of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks for turning centers, so anything you can do to organize and simplify this task will speed up your setups. In order to make the workholding setup when soft jaws must be machined, the setup person must remove the current top tooling from the chuck, find the set of jaws to be used for the new setup, mount the jaws to the chuck, clamp on some form of temporary plug or ring, and machine the jaws.

2 Jan 1999

How Do You Change The Perception Of Our Field?

While most CNC Tech Talk columns are technical in nature, every once in a while I hope you'll indulge me as I talk about a topic that is very close to my heart. I'm hoping this issue is of interest to everyone in manufacturing.

1 Dec 1998

Minimizing Tool Maintenance Time

One time-consuming task that often goes overlooked is tool maintenance. Tool maintenance is any task that involves upkeep on cutting tools used in the machining cycle.

1 Nov 1998

R Word Versus Directional Vectors In Circular Motions

Almost all current model CNCs allow you to specify an arc size in circular motions with a very convenient "R word. " Here is a tool path (based on cutter centerline motions) for Figure 1 using the R word as allowed by many machining center controls: O0001 (Program number)N005 G54 G90 S500 M03 (Select coordinate system, abs mode, start spindle)N010 G00 X6.

1 Oct 1998

Programming Efficient Tool Changes

Though machining center builders have come up with some pretty unique devices to automatically change tools, the programming words related to tool changing are relatively consistent from one machining center to the next. The "T word" is commonly used to rotate the machine's magazine (or tool storage device) to bring a tool into the ready or waiting position.

5 Sep 1998