Video: What Can Force Analysis Tell You About Your Machining Process?
See cuts and force profiles corresponding to tool failure, built-up edge and a tool that is too positive for the setup.

10 Ways to Think Differently about Robotic Automation
Take another look: A lot is happening in and around robotic automation. What robots might mean for machining and manufacturing is getting ready to change.

Robots and Education Will Help Address Manufacturing Labor Shortage
Part 2: Presenters at a seminar on robotization discuss how collaborative robots and improved college curricula will help address the 2-million-worker gap in manufacturing over the next 10 years.

Robots in Manufacturing: Advice, Predictions from Panelists
Part 1: TechSolve Inc.’s second robotics in manufacturing seminar focused on current and future applications for collaborative robots.

Mitsui Seiki, TechSolve to Demonstrate Blue Arc Method
The companies will showcase the Blue Arc electro-erosion metal removal method and demonstrate how it can quickly rough cut tough superalloys. 

Benefits and Challenges of Minimum Quantity Lubrication
Optis, a joint venture between TechSolve and Castrol, looks at the positive impact of MQL, the challenges to its implementation and the industry’s current uptake of the solution.

6 Factors Maximize Profitability in High-Precision Machining
Jon Iverson, CEO of Optis says it is important to take an integrated approach to improving manufacturing performance. Here are six key considerations that should form an integral part of the manufacturing strategy.

Easing the Entry into Additive Manufacturing
With funding from America Makes, Optomec and MachMotion worked together to develop a retrofit additive manufacturing system for machining centers.

Making Sure MTConnect Is a Good Fit
An MTConnect-enabled machine monitoring system gives shopfloor managers information that is driving up utilization rates and improving workforce communication for this manufacturer of high-pressure aerospace fittings.

Castrol Launches Joint Venture with TechSolve
A 50-50 partnership will help manufacturers improve efficiency across the supply chain.

A Visit to TechSolve’s Machining Lab
The M. Eugene Merchant Technology Development Center at TechSolve is a well-equipped machining lab dedicated to developing advanced machining processes and conducting machining-related research. The current projects in the lab reflect critical issues facing metalworking manufacturers, as I learned at a recent open house.

Video: Maximize Machine Tools with MTConnect
Joel Neidig, technology manager at ITAMCO, talks about how machine monitoring and other MTConnect-enabled technologies have benefited this north central Indiana job shop.

MT Connect: Two Shops Share Their Experience
For two shops in northern Indiana, using MTConnect for machine monitoring was just the start. Both shops are now ready to implement other promising applications.

Understanding MTConnect Agents and Adapters
MTConnect agents and their corresponding device adapters are simply small computer programs that work together so that MTConnect can make shop equipment and networks more readily connectible. In a nutshell, adapters enable existing shopfloor devices “to speak MTConnect,” and agents enable MTConnect messages and data files to be transmitted across a network to MTConnect-compatible applications.

The Need to Know Is Basic
An MTConnect-enabled monitoring system gives this shop a clear and simple picture of machine tool usage.

Lean Manufacturing Shapes A Cell
A machining cell that seeks to optimize product flow may look very different from a cell that seeks to optimize a machining process.

Picture-Perfect Manufacturing
The vision of a production process with little or no waste is the inspiration behind lean manufacturing. Value stream mapping is a graphical tool that this contract manufacturer uses to create that vision.

Lean Manufacturing Begins with Setup Reduction
This shop cut average setup time nearly in half. Now small batches can move quickly through the production process, making the company more responsive to customer needs than ever before.