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We've offered many specific suggestions for improving your CNC environment in this column. Indeed, our primary focus is to help you find ways to improve.
Companies go to great lengths to account for time, and this means tracking events that occur in the manufacturing environment. This is the only way to determine how well your company is doing: comparing current events to what has happened in the past or comparing these events to a target or goal.
The larger the lot size, the more likely it is that tools will dull during a production run. And of course, dull tools must be replaced if the production run is to be completed.
With a good application and when properly applied, a tool life management system can dramatically increase the output from a CNC machine tool. But I’ve seen quite a bit of misapplication and confusion when it comes to how and where to use these tools.
One advantage of any computer programming language is that you can use variables instead of hard-and-fixed numerical values. This can be especially helpful when the hard-and-fixed numerical value is repeated many times in the program.
Companies vary on how much documentation they provide for people setting up and running CNC machines. There may be reasons you document jobs in a certain manner, but there are three major factors that contribute to how much you should document: the percentage of repeated jobs, the number of people involved with a given job and the complexity of the job versus the skill level of the people involved.
Most current model Fanuc controls allow the use of geometry offsets to assign program zero. Each geometry offset contains the program zero assignment values for its corresponding cutting tool.
Sometimes obvious improvement possibilities go unnoticed. It could be that you are too close to a problem (you can’t see the forest for the trees), or you may not be spending enough time out in the shop to spot them.
In a previous CNC Tech Talk, we described a method of offset entry that allows the operator to simply enter a measured dimension when an offset adjustment is required (as opposed to calculating the actual amount of needed offset adjustment). The column met with rave reviews and is still available on the Web at
In most companies, the largest productivity gain can be achieved by improving the proficiency of people. This is true for just about any task to be performed, but here we’re talking about CNC machine tool use.