Smoothing Insert Surfaces Extends Tool Life  02/01/08
A post-coating finishing process smoothes any cracks in the outer coating of a cutting tool insert that develop during CVD and also removes droplets that PVD might leave behind. The resulting reduction in friction, heat and surface stresses is said to extend tool life and cutting performance.

Challenges In Cutting CGI  01/01/08
Compacted graphite iron is increasingly used for diesel and racing engine components. The choice of cutting tool can dictate how effective shops are able to machine this challenging material.

Atomic-Level Engineering For Greater Tool Life  10/01/07
Manipulating the direction of aluminum oxide crystals produces a cutting tool coating that is harder, and also cuts cooler.

Let Assembly Be The Inspection  09/01/07

This shop realized single-setup machining on a multitasking turning center, but there was still more efficiency to be found. When all of the part's machining had been consolidated, the shop realized that assembly operations could be performed at the same station as well.

A Tour Through Partners In THINC  08/01/07
Leading technology companies have gathered under one roof to provide one source for creative manufacturing solutions.

Automatic Monitoring And Adjustment System Matches Coolant Pressure To Tool Needs  08/01/07
Sponsored by Okuma. Custom software has been developed to automatically identify the tool currently in a machine's spindle and adjust the coolant pressure to the appropriate level.

Comments From The Partners  08/01/07
Partner representatives share reasons why they're involved in the Partners in THINC collaborative. Partners in THINC is a collaboration of leading technology companies gathered under one roof to provide one source for creative manufacturing solutions.

Eliminating Redundancy Through Tool Data Management  08/01/07
Sponsored by Okuma. A paperless tool management system allows equipment to communicate with each other to share cutting tool information.

Indexable-Insert Broaching Tool Technology For Lathes  08/01/07
A new indexable-insert-style broaching tool for CNC lathes provides two cutting edges per carbide insert. Because the tool body can remain installed in the lathe's turret during insert indexing or replacement, it is unnecessary to re-zero the tool after the change. 

Introducing Partners In THINC  08/01/07
Okuma's Larry Schwartz explains the philosophy that led to the creation of the Partners in THINC facility where leading companies have teamed to creatively problem solve and develop solutions for the manufacturing industry.

Oil Drill Coupling Production Gets Automated  08/01/07
Sponsored by Okuma. A manufacturing cell combines lathes, gantry robot and conveyor system to enable automated production of oil drill couplings.

A Quick Look At PEEK Machining  06/01/07
The use of PEEK polymer for medical implant devices is on the rise. A supplier of this material offers cutting tool tips for shops that may soon add PEEK machining to their list of capabilities.

A Tool Turret Tailored For The Task (Of Multitasking)  06/01/07
When Hardinge Inc. (Elmira, New York) designed its new "flagship" line of multitasking CNC turning centers, it paid particular attention to the turret tooling top plate.

From Out Of The Lab  06/01/07
Disruptive technology's  purpose is to disrupt the way machining is done. This article includes some of the developments to come out of the Machining Technology Laboratory (MTL), an R&D initiative dedicated to finding innovations in metalworking processes.

Bar Puller Basics  01/01/07
Bar pullers are cost-effective alternatives to enable automated turning on CNC lathes. This article explains how they work and how shops can benefit from using them.

'Rotational' Motion Lets Turning Compete With Grinding  12/01/06
Rotational turning provides machined surfaces smooth enough to let turning compete with grinding and polishing.

The Case For Quick Change On Multi-Spindles  12/01/06
Cam-driven, multi-spindle automatic machines are still the epitome of efficient, high-volume production equipment for small precision turned parts. When it comes to spitting out parts in quantities in the thousands or even millions, Davenports, Brown & Sharpes, New Britains, Acmes and other cam-driven machines excel in terms of parts-per-hour or other measures of cycle time.

A Subscription To Spindle Speeds  11/01/06
A peculiar characteristic of machine tools is that they can't be put to use until the user performs a critical final assembly step-installing the cutting tool in the machine.

Simplfying Thread Repair  11/01/06
Repairing damaged or worn threads on a workpiece is a common chore for toolroom lathes, especially in the oilfield industry. Haas Automation has a new feature for its conversational control units that simplifies and automates this process.

Finishing Process Extends Life Of Cutting Tools And Components  10/01/06
By applying compressive forces and abrasive media to cutting tools or workpieces, this surface finishing process improves component wear resistance and lubricity.

Turning The Long And Difficult  09/01/06
This shop has made large turning work its specialty. In proving to its customers that it can perform this difficult work, it has started to win more "standard" machining jobs.

Cutting Tools Enable Shop To Substantially Reduce Cycle Times  04/01/06
A Wisconsin automotive component manufacturer recently faced a chip control problem on an ID turning operation.

Modular Tooling Interface Doubles As A Universal Workholding Device  03/01/06
A precision drives manufacturer uses a quick-tool-change coupling in a new way-to secure critical components for machining. This allows faster setups and provides a single workholding interface for multiple types of machines.

A Cheap Tool May Be More Expensive Than You Think  02/23/06
Boeing engineer/scientist Keith Young warns machining suppliers not to focus solely on the purchase price of a cutting tool.

Cermets Get Assertive  01/01/06
The applications for cermet inserts today go well beyond finishing.

How To Succeed At Failure  01/01/06
Your cutting tool's failure mode may be telling you what to change about the process. Not every failure mode is the same, and one mode is preferable to all the others.

Machining Composites By Conventional Means  12/01/05
Composites machining is dusty, messy and hard on tools. But this company accepts these difficulties, and machines the material using standard metalworking processes and equipment.

How To Machine 'Pure Abrasion'  11/01/05
Powder metal parts have become the darling of the auto industry, but they can be a demon for the shops that must machine the finishing touches. This shop has found that the keys to success machining such abrasive materials are proper cutting tool selection and continuous tool wear monitoring.

Unattended Honing On A Vertical Chucker  11/01/05
An air-gage-monitored honing system added to an inverted vertical spindle chucking lathe allows unattended turning, boring and honing on one machine for greater process flexibility.

Lean Manufacturing Cutting Tool Inserts  10/01/05
This line of cutting tool inserts can machine a variety of materials using just one grade for milling and another for turning.

Making A Flexible Machine Tool More Flexible  09/01/05
Multitasking cutting tools can maximize the flexibility of multitasking machines.

CAM Adapts Feed Rates To Wiper Inserts  08/26/05
Like many other businesses today, textile manufacturers compete against imports from countries with low labor costs. To remain economically viable, companies constantly invest in technology. At B & S Machine Tool (Aiken, South Carolina), a shop that specializes in producing complicated replacement parts for textile machinery, modernization begins on the shop floor.

The Incentive Effect  08/01/05
The Future of Machining - 2005 It's not just changes in machining challenges that matter. Changes in cost analysis and business arrangements are also driving the introduction of new tools.

Extreme Tool Setting  07/01/05
A plant performing 79,000 tool setups per year measures these tools with one presetter and two gatekeepers.

Lean From The Get-Go  07/01/05
This shop was lean from day one. Its visual management tools form its lean manufacturing foundation.

Reducing The Anxiety When Turning Lights-Out  07/01/05
A turnkey lights-out package for CNC lathes may allay the concerns that shop owners may have in letting their machines run unsupervised during the night.

Upgrade Your Cutting Tool Mindset  06/28/05
A handful of timely observations may boost the productivity of your thinking about cutting tools.

CAM Software For Turning With Wiper Inserts  05/01/05
A wiper insert can achieve a smooth finish while turning at a high feed rate, but the insert's complex geometry makes programming accurate tool paths difficult. A CAM company working with a supplier of wiper inserts has addressed this problem.

Unusual Function For Groove And Turn System  05/01/05
Although this tooling was engineered for turn, face, profile, OD and ID groove, bore and cutoff applications, it is used in 95 percent of the company's threading functions in which large OD square threads are required.

Machining More Than Meets The Eye  01/01/05
Manufacturing parts that may be smaller than the chips generated during machining requires more than just the right cutting tool and machine. It requires a micro-mindset that focuses on all aspects of tiny parts processing--handling, inspection, finishing and assembly.

Machining Under The Microscope  01/01/05
Sandia National Laboratories experiments with turning and milling tools just 10 and 20 microns in size.

Lathe Toolholders For Turning Away  12/01/04
Think 'unattended machining,' and the image in your mind is probably complex - that is, some machining process that relies on automation more than the typical machining process does. But does going unattended have to involve this complexity? Instead of requiring automation, allowing the operator to step away from the machine tool might just be a matter of addressing the sources of worry that keep that operator engaged.

Applying Turn-Milling  09/01/04
Combining a rotating tool with rotating work produces a machining operation that is distinct from standard turning or milling.

Hard Turning Might Not Be As Hard As You Think  09/01/04
Turning hardened materials to grinding-like accuracies takes the right combination of part, machine and process parameters.

Using Hard Turning To Reduce Grinding Time  09/01/04
A machine tool builder found that by hard turning its lathe spindle shafts extremely close to net shape, it could cut grinding time in half.

New Turning Center Design Aims At Maximum Turning And Milling Rates  07/01/04
With this new series of turning centers, the builder was determined to take a fundamental approach, reexamining the dynamics of both the turning and milling processes performed by the machine. In all, a 15-person team spent 2 and a half years on the project, and the company believes the results were well worth the effort.

Competitive Testing Process Helps Manufacturer Take The Bite Out Of Cycle Times  04/01/04
To find a line of indexable inserts that would improve cycle times and provide increased tool life, this company invited eight tool manufacturers to test their inserts on turning applications on ductile iron workpieces machined at the company's facility.

Rolling Threads Has Advantages  09/15/03
With macros and canned cycles resident in the CNC on most contemporary turning centers, single point turning of OD threads can seem like almost a default process decision. However, for numerous applications, OD thread rolling has inherent advantages as an alternative to cutting threads.

Motor Maker Generates Savings With Turning And Milling Tool Changes  02/15/03
For a busy manufacturer of high-efficiency industrial drives, turning and milling a hardened stainless steel motor shaft posed serious productivity challenges.

Threading On A Lathe  01/15/03
The right choices in tooling and technique can optimize the thread turning process.

New Borders For Swiss-Type Turning  09/15/02
The traditional niche may be too narrow. This shop uses sliding-headstock lathes for jobs that wouldn't normally be run on this type of machine.

Tooling Reduces 21 Minute Job To 9 Minutes  09/15/02
Shop leadership was looking for a way to reduce the time it took to complete a very difficult boring job. The job took 21 minutes per part to complete with multiple roughing and finishing processes. It required 10 minutes of hone time.

Aviation Component Supplier Cuts Setup Time With Productivity Partnership  07/15/02
This shop turned to a tool supplier to help cut milling time on one alloy steel hydraulic body by 63 percent. The success led to a broader Productivity Improvement Program that identified some $87,000 in potential annual savings, and ultimately to a $600,000 payoff by introducing a quick-change modular tooling system.

Turning Difficult-To-Machine Alloys  07/15/02
The special properties of superalloys and titanium alloys call for special machining considerations.

Boosting Productivity For Turbine Engine Part Makers  05/15/02
Compared with common steel, the heat-resistant super alloys (HRSAs) and other hard metals used in jet engines and ground-based turbines require far longer cycle times per part. Advanced cutting inserts can boost machining throughput with these materials, but achieving these gains requires proper tooling selection and proper implementation.

Tailored Tooling Solves DIfficult Machining Applications  08/15/01
Recently, when Stewart Manufacturing (Springfield, Ohio) added a new product line, designing cost-effective production processes presented a variety of engineering challenges. Two of the biggest challenges were machining applications with characteristics that prevented the use of standard tooling.

Thermally Stabilize Spindles With Air  04/15/01
Heat is the number one enemy of machine tools. The machine tool spindle is one of the prime sources for generating heat in a machine.

Coating Improvements For Steel Turning  01/15/01
Relationships between coatings and substrate materials are keys to the performance of cemented carbide inserts.

Reducing Cycle Time With Tool Selection/Management Program  12/15/00
Most products at BuTech are turned from Type 316 stainless steel bar stock with hardnesses of 28 to 32 HRC. The cold-worked stock provides a higher hardness than typical for this stainless steel type.

Insert Has Built-In Wear Sensor  10/15/00
Kyocera's Sensor Tool turns the insert into its own breakage detection system.

Cermet Developments For Improved Finish Turning  09/15/00
The main improvements with these newly developed grades are higher machining security, broader application area, better ability to maintain surface finish and accuracy and improved capability to perform intermittent operations.

Winner By A Nose!  07/15/00
For some time, cutting tool manufacturers have offered an innovative insert geometry called wiper on milling inserts. In operation, wiper technology is designed to improve surface finish in milling applications. It works by positioning an insert with a flat just below the other ordinary parallel land inserts on a face mill. As the 'wiper' passes through the cut, it smoothes the surface

Trends That Drive Cutting Tool Development  04/01/00
Cutting tools have highly engineered coatings and geometries for all types of manufacturing methods and materials.

Troubleshooting Vibration In Unattended Turning  02/15/00
That loud shrieking noise in an unattended turning operation may be more than an annoyance. It may also be the symptom of vibration that is adversely affecting tool life and/or workpiece quality.

Aerospace On A Diet  11/15/99
The difficulty of close tolerance finishing in both high temperature alloys and titanium is particularly real in the Aerospace industry, where thinwall construction is becoming more common. Read how an insert gave this shop an edge.

Successful Application Of Ceramic Inserts  04/15/99
Applying ceramic inserts is not a simple substitution of one cutting tool material for another. There are significant process considerations that shops should examine carefully in order to realize performance and tool life expectations from ceramic inserts. Here's a look at some of the ways they are used.

Widening Range Of Grooving Tools  04/15/99
Traditionally, a grooving tool grooves, a facing tool faces and, of course, special tools do special cuts. Improved insert manufacturing technology and toolholder design is changing this tradition, allowing specialized tooling to be used more generically in a wider variety of metalcutting applications.

Optimize Your Machining Processes  04/01/99
To get the most out of machining operations, shops must employ both advanced tooling and machinery.

A Synergistic Approach To Machining Stainless Steel  01/15/99
One of the most interesting examples of this synergy comes out of its cutting tool and specialty steel operations. Sandvik has developed grades of stainless steel especially formulated for machinability along with cutting inserts especially designed for optimal performance with these workpiece materials.

Extending The Range Of PCBN  01/15/99
Thicker inserts and a wider variety of styles are allowing PCBN to be applied to a growing range of hard, ferrous applications.

Multiple Layer Coatings Keep Microcracks From Destroying Inserts  01/15/99
One reason why cutting tool inserts fail is that microcracks start in the top coating and work down to the substrate, eventually exposing the unprotected substrate to the damaging forces at work during a machining process. Slowing the formation of these microcracks and preventing them from reaching the substrate should therefore increase insert life.

Are You Turning Fast Enough?  09/15/98
Let's face it. When most shops go looking for process improvements, turning is seldom at the top of the list. Sure, many shops these days are doing fine work in such areas as reducing lathe setup, combining milling and turning operations on a single machine, and automating workpiece handling functions. But for all the talk of high speed machining and other milling and drilling process improvements, precious little of that kind of thinking is being applied to the turning process itself.

Read Your Chips  04/15/98
Are you sure you have the best insert for that turning operation? Check the chips, especially if you are running unattended. Chip characteristics can tell you a lot.

The Case For Cutting Tool Standardization  04/01/98
It's possible to increase overall machining efficiency at the same time you decrease cutting tool inventory. Here's how.

The Case For Optimized Inserts  01/01/98
A carbide insert is an engineered system consisting of substrate, coating, geometry and other components designed to work together. Insert manufacturers are getting very adept at optimizing this system and matching it to a given application.

Multi-Directional Turning System Quadruples Output Rate  09/01/97
Here's a look at a production machining contractor utilizing state-of-the-art CNC machine tools to produce components for suppliers and OEMs in the automotive, transportation equipment, and machine tool industries.

Latest Core Inserts Meet Near-Net-Shape Turning Needs  04/01/97
Cutting-tool makers now know more than ever about making general inserts for specific metalcutting applications. Here is some of what they've learned.

Machining Success From Insert Failure  01/01/97
Indexable inserts do not last forever, but some fail prematurely. By selecting the right insert, shops can extend tool life.

Tune Chatter Out Of Tools  11/01/96
A basic tenet of metalcutting is shorter tools are more rigid than longer tools and generally deliver better cutting results. Closer proximity of a cutting edge to a machining center spindle or turning center turret translates into higher feeds and speeds with better surface finish and less chatter.

Plant Floor Partnerships Pay Off  06/01/96
Synergy between the machine tool buyer, the machine tool builder, the machine tool distributor, and the tooling supplier doesn't just happen. But making it happen is well worth the effort, as the experiences of this company prove.

Taking The Fear Out Of Hard Turning  04/01/96
To make the transition to hard turning, you'll need to switch from carbide to CBN inserts, but that is easier (and more economical) than you might think. It's making the jump to much higher surface speeds that might scare you off. It needn't. Here's why.