Machining

a120nx Horizontal Machining Center

Makino announces its newest addition to the nx-series, the a120nx horizontal machining center. As the largest machining platform within the nx-series to date, this machine is built to take on oversized structural components for industrial equipment, diesel engines and semiconductor manufacturing, while delivering high levels of speed and accuracy.

CNC training begins with changing tools

01/09/2017

Author:

James Harvey

Shop Operations columnist James A. Harvey underscores the importance of his initial CNC training, which involved changing tools on a new mill. Just the act of changing a tool let him interact with the machine and controller in a way that gave him confidence.

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Lean from 30,000 feet

01/04/2017

Author:

Michael Deren

Michael Deren, who writes the Machinist's Corner column for Cutting Tool Engineering magazine, explains why he now believes wholeheartedly in lean manufacturing.

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New Machine Tool Program to Start at TCAT Elizabethton

A $650,000 grant awarded last year to TCAT Elizabethton has enabled the school to begin a new program, machine tool technology. The first class will begin Jan. 4.

Burning hard metal

01/11/2017

Author:

Michael C. Anderson

The Look Ahead department covers electro-erosion metal removal with a 5-axis horizontal machining center in the January 2017 issue of Cutting Tool Engineering.

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Mast Motorsports Makes Hurco Pitstop

This CTE+ report offers a first-hand account of how two 5-axis CNC milling machines from Hurco North America's helped Mast Motorsports replace some technologically obsolete production equipment. This is a CTE+ video supplement to the Productive Times article titled, "Out with the old ...," published in the December 2016 issue of Cutting Tool Engineering magazine.

Become familiar with CNC programming code

12/01/2016

Author:

James Harvey

Presented here is the second part of a two-part series of columns about the importance of becoming familiar with CNC programming code. The following describes the steps involved in manually writing a program.

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Maximizing with multispindles

12/01/2016

Author:

Kip Hanson

Before CNC lathes, most high-volume turned parts were made on multispindle, cam-driven screw machines. Setup times were long, and great skill was needed to design the cams and grind the cutting tools. However, by being able to perform a dozen or more operations simultaneously, they could produce hundreds—often thousands—of parts per hour. Whatever happened to those old mechanical monsters? According to Giovanni Principe, they’re alive and well.

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Achieving machining effectiveness

12/01/2016

Author:

Stas Mylek

In the first part of this two-part series, I looked at what actually happens in the cutting zone and how that knowledge allows end users to select the best possible cutting tool and CAD/CAM strategy for a particular material to optimize material removal. This second part covers why it is important to adopt this approach not only for all CNC machining processes, but as a significant production cost-saving measure companywide and industrywide.

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NIST: Fortify Manufacturing, Save $100 Billion, by Closing Tech Gaps

To spur significant innovation and growth in advanced manufacturing, as well as save over $100 billion annually, U.S. industry must rectify currently unmet needs for measurement science and "proof-of-concept" demonstrations of emerging technologies. This is the overall conclusion reached by economic studies funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of four advanced manufacturing areas used to create everything from automobile composites to zero-noise headsets.