Kip Hanson

New technology has reduced the footprints of sinker EDMs and made them smarter, faster and more efficient.

Electron beam drills make short work of microholes.

Debating the need for CAM systems on Swiss-style machines.

Antipullout toolholders reduce scrap, increase tool life and eliminate anxiety while milling.

I once thought nothing of boring a new set of top jaws. Just remove half a dozen cap screws, take the old jaws out, bolt on fresh jaws, attach a spider or boring ring and crank the hand wheel until the part fits. Setups were long in the 1980s and my boss considered 2 or 3 hours of downtime each day a normal cost of business.

Are machine shops ready to use MTConnect, an open and royalty free standard intended to foster greater interoperability between manufacturing devices and software applications?

The benefits of high-density workholding.

CAM systems generate innovative toolpaths to quickly remove large amounts of material when endmilling.

If you're not monitoring the condition of your CNC equipment, you're machining in the dark.

Using standard tooling on a CNC lathe means leaving money on the table, according to the cover story in the April 2013 issue of Cutting Tool Engineering magazine.

The U.S. economy appears to be on the mend. In January, the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation gave a tentative thumbs up to sustained business expansion through the first half of 2013. And the Institute for Supply Management's manufacturing index rose again in January, painting an optimistic picture. Maybe it's time to buy that machining center you've been thinking about.r Before you whip out your checkbook, though, some homework is in order. There's a lot more to machining centers than spindle speeds and rapid traverse rates. Sure, you've had good results over the years buying machines based on that, but that might be the wrong criteria in this brave new manufacturing world. You're facing growing competition from overseas and down the street, so you owe it to yourself to take a look at what's changed in the years since you bought your tried and true 20"×40" vertical machining center.

Tim St. Martin knew there had to be a better way of fixturing parts on his company's 5-axis machine tools. "We'd visited some of our suppliers and saw how they were holding parts on their 5-axis machines," said the senior manager of manufacturing engineering for Carlsbad, Calif.-based orthopedic implant manufacturer Alphatec Spine Inc. "They were mounting the blanks into a 'picture frame' and then screwing that frame to a tombstone-mounted fixture. This basically limited access to one side of the workpiece per operation. Many in our company thought we should hold them the same way."