When you look out at the world through the evening news, sometimes it seems like everything is turned upside down. Nothing seems to come out the way you'd expect, and the values we hold dear seem to be denied as much as they are affirmed.
There was something really interesting going on at the recent JIMTOF,the Japanese machine tool show. After finally showing some signs of life in 1997, the Japanese domestic machine tool market was once again heading south.
Quick-change chuck jaws make undeniable sense for any kind of high-mix lathe production. This shop finds them the right choice for medium-run and family-of-parts production too.
When Danny Hogge installed his first computer-based shop control system several years ago, he hardly imagined he'd soon be giving customers direct access to it via the Internet. As it turned out, it wasn't such a big leap after all, just a few logical steps down the road to where PC-based information technology is taking all businesses, and the metalworking business in particular.
My wife left a message the other day for me to pick up some things from the grocery store on the way home. It would have been a perfect little piece of Americana right out of 1950s television were it not for the fact that Sue e-mailed the message.
This company quickly transformed itself from a small machine shop to a high value-added supplier largely through the purposeful broadening of its manufacturing process knowledge. The trick was matching company resources with customer needs.
Here in Cincinnati, one refers to Cincinnati Milacron simply as "the Mill. " That's about two parts familiarity and one part fondness for a company that has been successfully making machine tools here for over a century.
Let's face it. When most shops go looking for process improvements, turning is seldom at the top of the list. Sure, many shops these days are doing fine work in such areas as reducing lathe setup, combining milling and turning operations on a single machine, and automating workpiece handling functions. But for all the talk of high speed machining and other milling and drilling process improvements, precious little of that kind of thinking is being applied to the turning process itself.
It came as a surprise when Ed Hoffman called to say that he was giving up his column in MMS. Our monthly commentator on workholding for as long as most of us can remember, Ed was himself a fixture in this magazine, and he will be missed.
As you already know from the cover, this issue of Modern Machine Shop is dedicated to IMTS—The International Manufacturing Technology Show. And as the sheer weight of this publication suggests, this year's exhibition is going to be the largest ever.