Medical

My recent past has, unfortunately, included the passing away of several acquaintances, one only 38 years old. I also read an obituary in the local paper about a machinist we formerly employed, a man only in his 50s.\r\nIn addition, an employee's wife was diagnosed with cancer, completely changing his priorities. Around this same time, my youngest brother had a medical scare, and my mother fell in her backyard and broke a shoulder, requiring a 4-week recovery and making it almost impossible for her to take care of her 90-year-old mother.\r\nThese events have brought a sobering degree of reality into my life. That is, the realization that time marches on for everyone and, eventually, something unexpected will impact our lives and our businesses.

The process of displacing metal instead of cutting it is called many things. But whether they call it form tapping, cold form tapping, thread forming, cold roll forming, roll forming, thread rolling, roll tapping or cold roll tapping, many metalworking professionals are unfamiliar with it, according to Peter Gennuso, applications engineering supervisor for OSG Tap & Die Inc., Glendale Heights, Ill.

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\nBefore 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.”

Continuing and concluding the theme of my previous two columns, this month's installment provides additional tips for enhancing the operation of a manual milling machine.

Provide centerless grinding machines that can produce parts with continually tightening size and surface finish requirements. Customized coolant filtration equipment.

Drilling cross-holes in some parts is no big deal. These are often simple parts, such as aluminum valve bodies, where the holes aren't too deep and meet on-center, and the customer can live with a small burr at the intersection.

X-ray scanning a part with internal features is useful because it creates 2-D images of those features in a nondestructive manner. Industrial computed-tomography, or industrial CT scanning, which is based on X-ray scanning technology, takes it a step further by providing a complete 3-D view for internal and external analysis.

Shop Operations columnist Tom Lipton offers tips for enhancing the operation of a manual milling machine.

Verify and optimize machining operations, including ensuring that cutting tools avoid interference. CNC machine simulation software.