Medical manufacturing, like other industries, faces intensive demands for improved productivity. As a result, many manufacturers are focused on achieving greater efficiencies and precision in making small parts.
Difficult materials and high-speed machining don’t just present problems for cutting tools. They can also push toolholders to their limits—and beyond. So manufacturers offer a variety of products designed to get the toolholding job done under extreme machining conditions.
Despite the challenges of COVID-19, research and expert analytics predict market growth in the near future for manufacturing in numerous industries, many of which rely on parts and components that require precision grinding.
Precision grinding operations cover all applications that require dimensions with tight tolerances and low Ra surface finish requirements, including cylindrical external grinding (OD), internal grinding (ID), surface grinding and creepfeed grinding.
May U.S. cutting tool consumption totaled $215.13 million, according to the U.S. Cutting Tool Institute (USCTI) and AMT—The Association For Manufacturing Technology.
It’s the machine tool acronym you never bother to put into words: CNC. And much of the time it’s probably OK to view your “computer numerical control” as a black box doing magic. But if you’re struggling with high-speed machining, need better surface finishes or higher accuracy, have training and retention problems, or want a better handle on your production efficiency, the answer just might be the latest iterations of those three little letters.
Despite the addition of more than 750,000 CNC mills in the past 15 years in the US, CNC machining job shops often hover at the bottom of the totem pole, where there’s little room for error as most bids are won by a 1–2% price variance.
In the early days at CNC Software, we saw that our Mastercam CAD/CAM system was only part of a larger manufacturing solution and that an open architecture foundation could allow seamless data communication with complementary devices and systems across the shop floor.
Sunnen Products Company has acquired BTA Heller Incorporated, a US-based manufacturer of deep hole tooling and systems for primary hole generation. This move aims to expand Sunnen’s honing expertise to include tooling for initial hole creation and other complementary bore sizing and finishing processes.
Machine tool orders posted mixed results in November, slipping a bit on a monthly basis while recording a solid gain compared with a year earlier, according to a monthly report by the Association for Manufacturing Technology (McLean, VA).
