If it's early September when you're reading this, then I am in Chicago. The International Manufacturing Technology Show—IMTS—is held during the first half of September in every even-numbered year.
A shop's next big improvement in efficiency or capabilities may require the kind of understanding that can only come from personal investigation, or from experimentation.
New automation, for example, may require new operator procedures to be proven out.
Recognizing the limitations of traditional approaches to pocketing, mathematicians at The Boeing Company have developed a system for generating tool paths that are better suited to pocketing at high feed rates. The same tool paths have demonstrated their usefulness at lower feed rates as well.
Shops in North America are machining high-value parts, including parts made from difficult-to-machine metals, as a larger share of their workload. When the MMS editors recently listed topics related to cutting tools that we intend to watch closely, we found this one factor—difficulty—at the heart of much of what is changing about shops' use of tooling.
A project aimed at making military aircraft parts faster shows just how much productivity gain can come from automating the programmer's repetitive tasks.
Most manufacturers that outsource machining work would prefer to deal with just one supplier. Nick Busche has heard this from customers, and he has also seen it in their RFQs.