Industry News

From a one-man engineering office to a technology and global market leader in just 50 years - a rare occurrence even in south-west Germany with all its "hidden champions." Blum-Novotest GmbH has achieved this not only through hard work but by being innovative, intelligent and diligent. To mark this event, the company held the BLUM TECH-TALK under the title "50 years of Innovation" in a special setting on 7 June 2018: Numerous guests from more than 20 countries heard keynote speeches from leading experts, saw interesting demonstrations in the BLUM Tech-Centre and witnessed the unveiling of a product that combines the experience gained from over 50 years in this field.

Kelsi Maree Borland writes that e-commerce has become the principal, or at least the most fervent, driver of industrial activity in the United States and particularly in Southern California, which is home to some of the country's tightest industrial markets. While e-commerce dominates U.S. industrial activity, manufacturing activity is still booming—south of the border. Mexico has picked up much of the industrial manufacturing business, and as a result the north Baja industrial region is seeing record-breaking stats.

When you think of a doing something "like a boss," words like confident, swagger, authority, cool, finesse and amazing come to mind. Those words apply to manufacturers who are killin' it day in and day out.

As part of a joint research project, the companies Blaser Swisslube and KAISER have searched for the optimal combination of tool and metalworking fluid for titanium cutting. The results are impressive.

The manufacturing community is finding workers in the form of veterans. While 80 percent of manufacturers report difficulty filling positions, more than 200,000 service members return to civilian life each year in search of new careers.

China's capital, Beijing, will shut about 1,000 manufacturing firms by 2020 as part of a program aimed at curbing smog and boosting income in neighboring regions, state media said. Beijing will focus on dynamic, high-tech industries and withdraw from "ordinary" manufacturing, reported the People's Daily, a Chinese Communist Party newspaper, citing a recent policy document published by the Beijing municipal government.

Hard work and first-class teamwork between the gear factory Hänel and Hainbuch have paid off. The new mandrel Mando G211 for gear manufacturers, suitable for gear hobbing, gear cutting and gear grinding, is available as a standard mandrel from stock and can be used optimally on gear cutting machines. Not only for Hainbuch was this project a success, but also for Hänel. This enabled optimization of manufacturing processes, reduced setup time and improved gear quality because the mandrel guarantees stable clamping and dampens vibrations.

Terry Iverson, a machine tool industry veteran, is on a quest to change the perception of the American manufacturing workforce landscape. The manufacturing floor is not what it once was. Computerized, clean and automated cells have emerged in the market and need an entirely new level of shop expertise.

U.S. manufacturing is not in decline but alive and well, producing record levels of output in recent quarters despite significant price deflation for manufactured goods. No other sector of the U.S. economy delivers greater value to American consumers than manufacturing when it comes to providing more and more output at prices that have declined annually by 2.64 percent in real inflation-adjusted terms over the past quarter century.

I'm not a morning person. If it were up to me, all alarm clocks on Earth would be rounded up and smashed with a giant hammer, their electronic corpses left to rot in a landfill far, far away from my home in Tucson, Arizona. I'm not sure what people on other planets do about the whole alarm clock situation, but I assume they are more advanced than humans and therefore late sleepers like me. Unless my dad's predictions about the looming extraterrestrial invasion are accurate, however, we'll never know.

Penn Stainless Products recently installed a new Koike Aronson Versagraph Millennium Series plasma cutting system (Model 6300) at its Jackson Center facility. The new unit provides western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio the same high-quality cuts available through PSP's Quakertown facility at shorter delivery times. The system utilizes Hypertherm HPR800XD HyPerformance plasma technology for a clean, consistent cut up to 2.5" thick, and features an extra-wide cutting envelope of 10 feet wide x 40 feet long.

To gain more knowledge about Industry 4.0 developments, I participated in the Taiwan Smart Machinery Media Tour Aug. 20-24. The Taiwan External Trade Development Council hosted the event. The council reports that Taiwan has the highest density of precision machinery cluster in the world, exports almost 80 percent of its products and is the fifth largest export country for machine tools.