Articles

How Do You Get The Cutting Parameters Right For Small End Mills?

A reader recently asked about speed, feed rate and depth of cut when using small tools in steel.

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What Lean Looks Like

A lean manufacturing consultant lists ways that lean shops look and operate differently.

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The Most Valuable Resource For Succeeding At Lean

What is the most valuable resource? The answer is probably obvious: the people. This shop started to succeed at lean manufacturing once every employee got involved.

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Moving Forward In Order To Stay Put

This job shop’s commitment to lean allows its business to grow while it remains in the facility where it has to stay.

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Laser Scanning Speeds Holemaking Operations

A laser scanning system offers an alternative to touch probing for quickly finding numerous hole positions in heat-exchanger workpieces.

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Deep Drilling Without Pecking Or Through-Tool Coolant

These drills enable machine tools to create holes with L:D ratios as high as 20:1 without pecking and without through-the-tool coolant delivery.

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Reducing Thrust Loads During Rigid Tapping

Some amount of synchronization error is inevitable with rigid tapping. By allowing just a slight amount of axial movement to compensate for synchronous errors, this tapping holder is said to reduce thrust load by as much as 90 percent.

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If You Want to Improve Something, Measure It

This shop involves all of its employees in the daily exercise of analyzing just where time is being spent.

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Be Strategic With Your Holemaking Options

Just as there are a great many types of holes to be produced in today’s complex workpieces, there are a great many types of holemaking processes. Finding the right cutting tool for each holemaking application is a matter of asking the right questions and getting good answers from a cutting tool supplier.

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Coolant And Center-Drilling Considerations For Machining Small Holes

Through-spindle coolant is good if you can get it, but the spot drilling might not be necessary. Try a pilot hole instead?

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How Do You Stop A Thin Aluminum Workpiece From Curling?

The material condition is more likely to be the culprit than any particular choice at the machine tool.

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Pins: The Alternative To Parallels

These vise jaws use protruding, mechanical pins to repeatedly support workpieces either horizontally or at angles. They are said to allow quicker setups than conventional parallels.

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