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Showing 161 – 170 of 299 resultsThe 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.
Various control panel functions can lead to potential tool crashes. Look out for these three.
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.
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.
Instead of expensive tool life management systems, try using a custom macro.
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.
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.
CNC lathes with live tooling capabilities can perform machining operations similar to those done on milling machines and eliminate secondary operations.
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.
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.