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1 month ago | 
advancedmanufacturing.org | Kip Hanson
At the risk of sounding cynical, CNC machine shops tend to underestimate the need for high-quality modern tooling.
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2 months ago | 
advancedmanufacturing.org | Kip Hanson
1. Shop RatesMany shops use blanket costing, quoting and burden rates for all of the machinery on the production floor. Sure, it’s easy to say, “Our shop rate is $125 per hour,” but does this make sense? Why should the $250,000 five-axis machining center that still has a loan on it have the same rate as the engine lathe collecting dust in the corner, or the three-axis vertical that you paid off during the Bush administration? 2. Customer DataEstimating takes a lot of time.
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2 months ago | 
advancedmanufacturing.org | Kip Hanson
Terry is the estimator for Dave’s Precision, a 50-person job shop in Anytown, USA. He learned his job from the owner, who reluctantly handed over the quoting reins a few years ago. Dave also handed over a spreadsheet that he began working on nearly two decades ago and has continuously tweaked ever since.
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2 months ago | 
advancedmanufacturing.org | Kip Hanson
Still, I was managing a small shop and concerned about all the time we wasted setting tool lengths, never mind the occasional crash due to a fat-fingered offset. I knew the owner wouldn’t spend the cash for a presetter, so I cobbled one together from an old surface plate, a drop indicator and a glass scale I’d picked up for a few hundred bucks. Then, I sold a story about the experience to a trade magazine. It was my first writing gig and one of a few dozen articles I’ve shared on the topic.
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2 months ago | 
advancedmanufacturing.org | Kip Hanson
Anyone who’s spent time inside a computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine has probably wondered how much radiation their body absorbed, and whether the medical diagnoses gleaned from the resulting images outweigh the risk of developing cancer from the radiation exposure. Stop fretting. MRI is a mature technology that uses powerful magnets and radio waves to image soft tissues; unlike CT scanning, there’s no ionizing radiation involved.
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2 months ago | 
fsmdirect.com | Kip Hanson
I submitted my first article to Stamping Productivity’s flagship magazine, FAB Shop Magazine Direct, in 2012. Its title? “Check Your Fly.” The editor at the time, Russ Olexa, let that risqué headline slide, but gently admonished me about the intro, which explained the mechanics of flywheel stamping presses. “Don’t need this as our readers know all about mech. presses,” he wrote, then returned it for additional editing.
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2 months ago | 
fsmdirect.com | Kip Hanson
Shapers. Few metalworkers today could even spot one in a machinery museum, let alone operate one. Perrin G. March could. In 1898, he and a group of enterprising engineers founded the Cincinnati Shaper Co., not far down the road from another well-known – but now defunct – machine tool builder, Lodge and Shipley.
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Feb 28, 2025 | 
advancedmanufacturing.org | Kip Hanson
For as long as the additive manufacturing (AM) industry has existed, it’s been a place of continuous improvement. EOS founder Hans Langer, PhD, has been responsible for much of it. Since 1989, he and his team have delivered one advanced technology after another, bringing their metal and polymer 3D-printing solutions to the forefront of AM innovation. One such advancement is beam shaping, a technology that Andrew Snow, senior vice president for EOS North America, describes as transformative.
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Feb 11, 2025 | 
mscdirect.com | Kip Hanson
Of all the products that additive manufacturing is used to create, medical implants may be the ones for which it’s most uniquely qualified. That’s because the system, more commonly known as 3D printing, specializes in forming complex shapes like those found in hip bones and ear canals—shapes that are difficult and sometimes impossible to generate on CNC machine tools. But wait: Mill-turn lathes and 5-axis machining centers routinely cut these shapes and more, right?
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Jan 28, 2025 | 
advancedmanufacturing.org | Kip Hanson
Robert Taylor recently gave a presentation to a potential customer. Because he is the program manager for machine tool data collection and connectivity at FANUC America Corp., Rochester Hills, Mich., it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine the topic: data collection, machine tool monitoring and the company’s MT-LINKi software platform. PRO TIP:Shops that embrace data collection and machine monitoring stand to gain much more than firefighting tools.
