Vertical Milling Upgrade for High-Power Manufacturing Northeastern United States manufacturing company gets a machine tool upgrade from Kent USA Unless you’re a scientist or microwave engineer, you could probably care less about waveguides. In fact, most people would have a hard time describing one. Despite their esoteric nature, however, waveguides are both more important and [...]
Vertical Machining Centers: Two Important Options to Look For When Buying Walk into almost any machine shop and you’re sure to see a line of vertical machining centers (VMCs). You'll probably find that all of them have similar travels, similar controls, and similar features, regardless of the machine logo or paint color. Does that mean, then, [...]
5 Years and Millions of Parts with the KVR Machining Center Millions of parts later, the management team at this manufacturing company remain quite happy with their machine tool decision Being a Tier III supplier to automotive and appliance OEMs is high-volume, extremely competitive work, where success depends in large part on fast, accurate, and [...]
A Productive Journey Wisconsin job shop expands its small part capabilities with a new CNC machining center from Kent USA Every shop faces the same situation at one point or another. The machine tools are either too large and slow to be competitive on smaller parts, or too small and underpowered for the larger ones. [...]
Twin Turrets: Making Oilfield Lathes Twice as Productive Twin turret. Dual turret Double turret. Whatever you call them, there’s no arguing that they increase productivity compared to traditional single turret CNC lathes. That's true no matter what you’re making, but especially so with very large or very long parts, like those produced by oil and gas [...]
Big Bore Lathes: Three Reasons Why You Should Move to CNC Not so long ago, I offered a few reasons to supersize your underpowered or undersized big bore lathe. I also suggested some things to look for when doing so. I'm going to make a similar argument, except this time I'm talking to those of you [...]
Traveling Column Machines: Three Ways Additional Travel Improves Productivity I’ve always been intrigued by traveling column machines. That's because a vertical machining center able to mill both ends of a sleeper sofa or carry parts that weigh more than the recently-resurrected Ford Ranger (there’s a yellow 2003 in my driveway) raises a lot of possibilities. This [...]
Four Things Job Shops Should Know When Searching for the Best Vertical Machining Center VMCs are the workhorses of any job shop. They’re able to machine a huge variety of parts. The tooling is widely available, as are machine operators. VMCs are also less expensive than a comparably-sized horizontal or five-axis machining center. Finding the best [...]
Quick-Change Tooling: Four Off-the-Shelf Solutions to Cut Downtime on CNC Machine Tools Spending a few hours or even an entire shift setting up a CNC machine tool was once considered no big deal. Not anymore. With job quantities dropping and shops under increased pressure to reduce costs, setup time is critical. Of all the continuous improvement [...]
High-Speed Machining: Four Ways to Increase Productivity and Cut Costs Hogging with a high-speed steel corncob cutter was once considered the best way to remove lots of material quickly. No longer. The techniques that work well on a manual knee mill have no place on CNC machining centers. Instead, machinists should apply lighter radial depths of [...]
