General Shop Equipment & Supplies

Stopping a machine to measure a workpiece is a waste of time. Not only is a high-priced piece of CNC equipment being taken out of production, but the measurements obtained when a machinist leans into a machine with a micrometer or bore gage can't compare in accuracy to those generated by a coordinate measuring machine or inline probe.

END USER: Garr Tool Co., (800) 248-9003, www.garrtool.com. Increase uptime for lamp-pump laser marking machines by reducing equipment maintenance and downtime. Fiber diode-pump laser marking machines. SOLUTION PROVIDER: Beamer Laser Marking Systems, (810) 638-5388, www.beamerlasermarking.com.

The Village of Elk Grove, Ill., will host the second annual Made in Elk Grove Manufacturing and Technology Expo on Oct. 21 at 1925 Busse Road. The Expo provides attendees from around the Midwest an opportunity to connect, collaborate and cultivate relationships with Elk Grove-based manufacturing companies. Over 1,000 people attended the inaugural Expo in 2013, which featured approximately 100 exhibitors from industries ranging from precision machining, plastics and electronics to packaging and industrial services.

Mitee-Bite Products LLC., Center Ossipee, N.H., has expanded its customer service program. The company continues to assist customers with no-cost clamping recommendations and on-site visits through its national sales team, and now also offers workholding design services, from simple conceptual CAD drawings at no cost to top-level CAD designs ready to import into CAM software, which are part of the company's fee-based services. Mitee-Bite engineers work with customers to develop and build turnkey workholding designs at the company's Center Ossipee location.

Beamer Laser Marking Systems debuts a new 24" indexable turntable at its booth during IMTS 2014. Beamer, which suffered a fire in January, expects to move into its new 6,500 sq. ft. facility in October. The new facility will be dedicated to producing laser marking systems.

Garr Tool Co., a toolmaker in Alma, Mich., has purchased six laser-marking machines from Beamer Laser Marking Systems since 2008. Four of the machines are automated, except for an operator setting up the format. The other two are manual systems for small-quantity production runs and blueprint specials. Garr Tool, which laser marks more than 2 million solid-carbide endmills a year, uses fiber diode-pump laser marking machines from Beamer.

Simultaneous machining on two to four spindles enhances efficiency and lowers the cost per part for high-volume production. In this CTE video supplement to "When more is better," featured in the October 2015 Cutting Tool Engineering magazine, Chiron demonstrates why it's critical is to properly capacitize a multispindle machine.

Jack Burley, vice president of sales & engineering at BIG Kaiser Precision Tooling Inc., presented an overview of technology designed to tackle deep hole boring challenges during IMTS 2014.

Cutting Tool Engineering Publisher Don Nelson visited the Makino booth during IMTS 2014 in September to learn more about the company's a81nx and a61nx-5E HMCs.

Philip Paull, owner of Noblesville, Ind.-based Excavating Solutions, won the Hurco Chipmaker Challenge Championship at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) in Chicago. The prize package includes a new Hurco CNC mill worth over $100,000, a tooling package from Sandvik Coromant Co., and $10,000 of Hurco credit that can be used for training or machine options.

Tsugami/Rem Sales, the exclusive North American importer of Precision Tsugami machine tools, will host the Precision Machined Products Association's (PMPA) first East Coast Mini-Tech Conference at its Windsor, Conn., facility on Nov. 12, 2014. The conference targets machine shop workers in the Northeast U.S. and will include 6 hours of training, including metal cutting technology, production risk assessment based on part drawing analysis, and an interactive machining demonstration. PMPA Industry Research and Technology Director Miles Free will also explain material certification terminology.

Midwest Industrial Tool Grinding Inc. (MITGI), Hutchinson, Minn., has been awarded a 2014 Image Award, one of eleven Manufacturing Awards presented by Minnesota Business Magazine. A first time finalist for the award, MITGI was honored for its efforts to improve the industry's image and for promoting careers in manufacturing.