Sustainably streamlining production of a varied mix of low-volume work depends not only on a strategy tailored for job shops, but also on human drive and enthusiasm.
This year’s annual open house marked the debut of not only a new series of wire EDMs, but also an apprenticeship program designed to serve as a pipeline of application and service engineers for years to come.
As opposed to springs or other mechanical means of driving tool inserts into hole intersections, leveraging pneumatic or hydraulic pressure provides a means of process control beyond feed and speed adjustments.
Among other highlights, this year’s iteration of DMG MORI’s annual open house event showcased the company’s latest efforts to connect traditionally disparate machining operations, both in the physical sense and the virtual sense.
Consisting of only two components, this linear axis calibration device measures error in all six degrees of freedom—including roll—directly and in real time.
Testing shows that understanding the interplay among cutting speed, tool wear and cutting power can lead to more informed evaluation of metalworking fluids and more predictable machining.
Automation takes work. In this case, the challenge was ensuring zero-defect production without slowing the two-part-per-second through-feed grinding process.
For all its focus on machines, cutters, parameters and tool paths, an expo hosted by Methods Machine Tools demonstrated that competitive hard milling increasingly requires looking beyond the workzone and even beyond traditional machining.