General Shop Equipment & Supplies

Mitsui Seiki USA Inc. announces a new series of large, highly accurate CNC jig mills for producing mold bases, mold plates, precision hot runners, progressive and transfer dies, and other jig boring and milling applications. The fixed cross-rail, massive ram design of the J1620 and J1620X machines provides a straightness accuracy in X and Y axes better than 10 microns, according to the company.

Wohlhaupter Corp. has upgraded its popular 019 boring head and made it "digital ready." The VarioBore head can be ordered with or without a docking port and associated internal electronics to accommodate the new Universal Digital Readout Module.

... in these golden years," crooned the late David Bowie in one of his smash hits. The term "golden years" is also used in Albert B. Albrecht's book "The American Machine Tool Industry: Its History, Growth, Restructuring & Recovery," which he revised in 2015 for the third edition. AMT—The Association For Manufacturing Technology sponsored the book. Albrecht defines the golden years of the machine tool industry as being from 1948 to 1998. "It was during this period that the United States machine tool industry led the world in both machine tool production and consumption," Albrecht wrote.

Presented this month are more programming tips to help prevent machine tool crashes.

Careful consideration when implementing inspection processes yields efficiencies. Manufacturers continually search for ways to increase profits and reduce costs. Trying to find cost savings where chips are made makes sense and is usually where the most-significant improvements are found. However, efficiency gains can also be made in nonvalue-adding areas, like inspection.

Do you know why your last part run had a high defect rate, why parts from an outside supplier were nonconforming, and what you are going to do with those parts? If your company has a material review board, it can probably answer those questions.

Whether your shop is busy or struggling to survive a downturn, employees are your best asset. We've had to downsize over the past few months, but a good group remains. Many are handling new tasks, but a reengineering of employees' tasks can be beneficial, driving everyone to work smarter, not harder. It is working well so far, thanks to everyone picking up the slack created by the departed employees.

When CNC wire EDMs came on the market in the mid-'70s, feeding wire from a spool through a machine's elaborate series of rollers and guides was a tedious manual exercise. Luckily, electrical discharge machining was an exceedingly slow process back then, so replacing wire had to be done less frequently than on today's machines, which erode conductive metal 10 to 20 times faster than earlier models.

TYKMA Electrox, Chillicothe, Ohio, a worldwide supplier of industrial laser systems, in February introduced a new brand identity following the year-old merger between TYKMA Technologies and Electrox Laser Marking Systems.

The new TRAUB TNL32-11 sliding/fixed headstock automatic lathe has a headstock moving in the Z-axis, an upper and identical lower turret with X, Y, and Z-axes, and a counter spindle movable in the X and Z directions. It offers a new front working attachment which sits on an additional cross-slide moving in the X and Z axes, providing the user with further, freely positionable tools and enables the use of up to three tools, simultaneously and independently of each other.

Hydraulic pressure on work supports diminishes faster than other clamps in the system. This can result is unplanned part movement or premature work support wear. Postponing the work support unclamp is the objective, and Vektek has developed an Unclamp Delay Valve to do just that.