Innovative Manufacturing used to spend ten minutes per part machining cast iron differential housings for golf carts, but now total machining time is down to three minutes, 45 seconds. According to Innovative owner and president Rob Sander, the productivity leap came when the company consolidated tu

 Mark Campbell of A.M. Machining (Hilliard, Ohio) knew that he had to do something to replace the manual lathe for his machine shop, which specializes in prototype parts, tooling fixtures, jigs, CNC milling and CNC turning. The manual lathe was too slow at producing parts and not able to hold rep

Standard procedure for shaft work at job shop Grand Haven Steel Products (Grand Haven, Michigan) was historically to soft turn, send the parts out for hardening, and then grind to the final tolerance. The turning applications were not terribly demanding, as the shop typically only had to hold ±0.

Busch Precision (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) management wanted to leverage its first 90 years of responding to individual precision machining needs—especially those for machine tools and other heavy equipment—to include the larger, more complex components needed for construction equipment, far

Atomic City Tool (ACT), Inc., saw its production volume mushroom after it began making tooling for the hot forging of automotive and non-automotive engine valves. Powered by five Cincinnati Machine horizontal CNC turning centers, ACT has seen a five-fold increase in volume in just over five years of

For many job shops in manufacturing, mold and die work usually refers to making parts that are asymmetrical. Sheet metal components are of various shapes, and injection molded plastic parts range from telephones to computer cabinets. However, there are, in the world of die and mold making, a gr

When a Federal-Mogul Corporations work volume increased five years ago with Ford Motor Company to manufacture polytetraflouroethylene (Teflon) PTFE piston rings, Federal-Moguls Michigan plant turned to Emco-Maier Corporation for automated CNC turning centers to turn out millions of rings per year

Any machine tool builder striving to be responsive to customer interests and demands will reflect those interests and demands in the new machines it introduces. A case in point is Hitachi Seiki, which recently introduced a new horizontal machining center and a new turning center. Both of these ma

Machine tool builder Okuma America Corporation has introduced a new CNC lathe to address the growing need for a family of products suited to the needs of both first-time CNC users as well as experienced manufacturers supplying diverse industries with precision turned parts. Designated the Crown,

Milltronics Manufacturing Company, a CNC (computerized numerical controls) machine tool builder located in Waconia, Minnesota, is a major manufacturer and marketer of high quality, cost effective machining centers, toolroom and bridge mills and toolroom lathes sold both in the United States and a

A good example is the new 8050TC lathe CNC from Fagor Automation (Elk Grove Village, Illinois). The aim of the new design, says the builder, is to offer lathe users a CNC as simple to operate as a DRO. The new CNC offers an easy and intuitive interface, eliminating the need for a lengthy training pe

Fast job changes on a bar-fed CNC lathe is just wishful thinking if it takes forever to change over the bar feeder. Swiss-Tech Inc., a Delavan, Wisconsin screw machine shop that specializes in Swiss-type parts, was mindful of that fact when it purchased its Star CNC bar machine. Swiss-Tech did not

At IMTS 94, Jerry Mutter, the owner of Advance Machine Works in Richmond, Virginia, was looking for a new lathe with a few specific requirements. He wanted a rugged vertical CNC lathe that could handle an increasing workload of heavy pieces. He needed a machine that he could rely upon and yet hav

When Jim and Joe Davis started their job shop in 1987, they thought they had a good shot at making it big in the medical industry. They were already half-way there. Rather than starting from scratch, the two brothers bought out the precision Swiss lathe department from the downsizing medical-industr

How do you minimize unit cost for complex parts in need of turning, milling and drilling? For Steve Hattori, the answer is simple: Machine them with just one setup--and make that setup as simple as possible. The president of the contract shop Salinas Valley Precision (Salinas, California), Mr. Hatt

During an auto race, where fractions of a second mean the difference between winning and losing, nobody wants to stop and examine the thread quality of a wheel stud. Yet wheel stud threads are extremely important, especially when you consider that the driver's safety and millions of dollars are

Davenport Machine Company hit on a good multispindle machine design just after the turn of this century. It was good enough, according to Don Firm, company president, that many parts are interchangeable between a 1908 model DA on display at company's Rochester, New York headquarters and the 1996

Near-net-shape (NNS) turning is a trend thats elbowed its way into the manufacturing mainstream over the course of two decades. The idea is understood by nearly everyone in manufacturing now. At its root, NNS turning simply means turning parts that have been formed or cast close to final dimensio

Photo Credit: Romi Romi says its C 1800H heavy-duty CNC lathe from is ideal for machining large steel parts and components. Weighing in at 97,000 lbs, the lathe features a distance between centers from 157" to 394", a 47" swing over cross slide and a maximum weight capacity between

Photo Credit: Romi Romi’s new GL 250 horizontal turning center features thermal compensation with sensors to maintain stable, dimensional results. According to Romi, the use of sensors provides accurate, real time compensation as opposed to compensation based on pre-defined algorithms. The