Every mold has a price—the figure quoted to you on the bottom line of the RFO. That price is a “good faith” estimate and includes the hard costs of design time, raw materials, mold components, programming and machining time. […]
Shop design is as subjective a topic as the tools in a craftsman’s box. Past experience and personal preference are the main ingredients to a floor plan that is normally dictated by the space you have been allotted and the machine tools and other equipment you have to include into the layout. […]
The idea of improving mold performance and maintenance efficiency is an easy buy in for anyone in the molding business. Actually doing it is another matter. The distance between rhetoric and practice continues to grow as companies talk incessantly about the need to improve maintenance and mold reliability, and then bicker over the burden of [...]
How many times have you received a 2-D drawing that was created from a 3-D model, only to then spend days recreating it in your CAD or CAM system? To me, all of the back and forth seems a little ridiculous. Engineers are designing parts or assemblies in 3-D CAD and then spending hours creating [...]
Most business leaders in manufacturing will agree that the economic recovery has been in progress for many months. Proposal activity is surging and orders are beginning to roll in again for the strong companies that have survived. […]
Hot runners have long made processing more efficient and cost effective while improving part quality. However, in cleanroom applications, those benefits have been offset by the need to use pneumatic hot runners with slower response times and weaker closing forces. […]
Taking the powder metallurgical process even further are new developments in antigalling tool steels. These steels have taken the concept of a lubricious coating and brought it to the powder stage of manufacture. Nitrogen is diffused throughout the tool steel cross-section in the form of nitrides. […]
There have been many topics posted in the Random Musings forum about asking tips & advices when buying a desktop or laptop. So I thought it would be nice to summarize all the useful info here, with fantastic support on this article from Cyberdemon who has already given some great advice on hardware and software [...]
Change isn’t always the most comfortable part about running a business. Sometimes it seems that just as we begin to figure it all out we’re faced with an entirely new set of challenges that force us to look at how we do things and completely reevaluate our priorities. But as uncomfortable as that change can [...]
With rapid tooling (RT) technologies emerging and the increasing demands put on toolmakers, the issues of if and when to use RT are becoming critical topics in the manufacturing community. The world of conventional toolmaking is faced with an increasing list of problems, the first being increased competition – local and foreign. Customers also are [...]