During the past three years, we have seen many tool shops suffer from servicing just one industry. The danger of being so specialized is being buried with work when the market is good—forcing one to ignore opportunities from new customers in different business areas—or drying up entirely when sales are slow for an extended period [...]
The word automation means different things to different people, but when related to CAD/CAM there is a more common view. It means reducing menu clicks for frequent tasks. In a production environment, a frequent task could be something as simple as programming a certain type of groove on a turned profile. Saving these menu selections [...]
Medical parts have different requirements than other molded articles, and as a result tooling engineers over the years have pioneered new mold materials, coatings and mold maintenance practices. […]
A review of machining options for tapered rib processing, typically found in plastic injection and die cast molds. Applications involving tapered ribs are usually associated with plastic injection and die cast molds. For many years the process used for creating tapered ribs was EDM; however, utilizing programming processes that incorporate high-speed machining (HSM) principles can [...]
Today’s mold manufacturer is often looking for time and cost savings on many levels. There are solutions—whether it is to reduce development times, accelerate the configuration of entire initial sample test reports or shorten reaction times for damage analyses. […]
If you own a small manufacturing business and have a Web site or if you are looking to launch one in the near future, learning a little bit more about search engine optimization is something you might want to consider.By maximizing your search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities, […]
To be successful, you first have to eliminate as much labor and as many operations as possible. By having the correct tools, whether cutting tools, the machine itself and/or the software, these items are necessary for the speed and accuracy required in today’s market. […]
For example, if you currently machined a core or cavity insert on your traditional CNC machine in 50 hours at $65 an hour ($3,250) and added approximately $300 for consumable tooling costs, […]
Many CAM software products produce toolpath process data and write neutral-formatted output files, like APT CL data. An external postprocessor program then translates the neutral data to a specific machine tool focusing on machine tool kinematics and controller syntax information. This traditional process has certainly been successfully applied. […]
Advanced CAM software products have abilities not only to identify collisions prior to bringing them to a machine, but also avoid these collisions. When collisions are identified, there may be many alternative cutter orientations that can provide a non-interfering instruction. […]