Huot’s safety tool covers provide an extra measure of security for proprietary CNC tooling and confidential manufacturing processes. The CNC DCMT Insert safety covers allow the operator to select the correct tooling while visitors or personnel are touring non-secured manufacturing areas. For tooling identification, covers WNMG Insert can be written on with a dry-erase marker.The safety covers protect valuable CNC tooling from damage that can occur when retrieving or storing tooling. The covers also keep staged tooling clean and ready for fast setup. When reaching in to retrieve tooling, workers’ arms are protected from being cut, thus minimizing time and costs from accident injuries, the company says.The safety covers are held in place with keyhole slots molded into their base and shoulder bolts installed on the ToolScoot. A simple twist releases the cover for tooling retrieving, and another twist locks the cover back in place. The tooling covers are built for use with tapers 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, HSK 63A or HSK 100A.
The Carbide Inserts Website: https://www.estoolcarbide.com/product/tcmt-steel-inserts-cnc-lathe-turning-p-1204/
It seems that in today’s manufacturing environment, consultants to metalworking shops (and trade magazine editors) would be virtually speechless if the word “niche” were to suddenly disappear from our vocabulary. It’s touted everywhere. Metalworking businesses are advised, cajoled, directed and told from every direction to find a niche in order to survive.
Of course, niche manufacturing is only one of many operating strategies for shops trying to find ways to successfully deal with the changing landscape of domestic manufacturing. But regardless of the strategy chosen, success is in the tactical execution. Any strategy can only be as good as the shop is at making it happen.
Long before the current ballyhoo of finding niche markets descended on metalworking shops, RPM Carbide Die, Inc. (Arcadia, Ohio) found its specialty. In 1967, this shop started up grinding carbide.
And after almost 40 years, it’s a niche the company continues to get better at by continuously improving its capability through the implementation of better machine tool technology and ever more precision-driven processing knowledge. The carbide manufacturing specialty has also become a platform for other niches that the company has successfully ventured into including hard turning and milling of steel, cutting exotic metals and ceramics for aerospace, and even cryogenic treatment of cutting tools.
A willingness to try new things is a hallmark of most job shops. Without an innate curiosity about how to do things, most job shops would fail because of the nature of the business. Every job that crosses the shop’s threshold is new and requires a facile mind to approach its profitable processing.
At RPM, curiosity is part of the shop culture. It stems from the company’s founder, Walter Metcalfe, and is embodied in his son, Eric, who is president of the company.
The company’s hard-earned expertise in working with carbide triggered a natural migration into working with other difficult materials. Tool steels, exotic aerospace materials and ceramics are now part of the RPM process proficiency portfolio.
“Most of our machinists would rather grind carbide than steel,” says Eric Metcalfe. “They find Tungsten Steel Inserts it easier to process; the surface finishes are nicer; size is easier to hold; dwells are better; it’s more predictable than steel. Getting steel off the grinders is what led us to hard turning.”
An implementation pattern developed as the company moved into new areas of manufacturing. “When we looked to expand our capabilities beyond grinding carbide,” says Mr. Metcalfe, “we first acquired the best tools we could. An example was our move into hard turning. We purchased CNC turning equipment and, after a short learning curve, the turning department was cranking out parts at very high efficiency levels. The key for hard turning and other process additions was to give the employees the right tools and let them do what they know how to do.” RPM turns only tool steel with hardness from 60 to 70 Rc. The shop uses CBN inserts for surface milling cutters all of its hard turning operations.
This pattern, using current technology as a base for process expansion, was repeated in the EDM department, hard milling department and multi-processing (turn/mill) departments. The result for the business was an increased base of capability for the shop to go after a wider market and a solid base of expertise in a wider range of processes.
“We took our core competency of grinding carbide and parlayed it to other materials and processes. This greatly expanded our capability as a job shop to offer more to our existing customers, and it helps us acquire new ones,” recalls Mr. Metcalfe.
Any business that is growing its capacity, as RPM did while implementing and optimizing its expanded capability, must juggle resource allocation. “As we worked to get our new departments up, running and contributing,” says Mr. Metcalfe, “the flagship carbide grinding department continued doing its excellent work with little technological attention from the company. We felt if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”
Most of the company’s highest-skilled employees were working in the grinding department, and although they were using the company’s least advanced equipment—mostly manual grinders—the work got out the door. However, after evaluating the efficiency of the new departments, based in large part on the newer technology that was installed, grinding was now the company’s least efficient department.
In 2000, RPM invested in new grinding technology. The company purchased a Studer CNC grinder to address the technology gap that had arisen in the grinding department. The machine’s ability to profile grind under programmed control was a large technology leap from the manual machines used at RPM.
Like the pattern in the other departments, it soon became clear to the “old hands” that this new CNC grinding machine had advantages. They could not only increase the efficiency and throughput over the older manual machines, but there were some operations the machine could do that previously required secondary operation such as EDM to pull off.
During 2001, the shop experienced its first business downturn in 11 years. “We reduced our employment and took the opportunity to re-evaluate how we were manufacturing,” says Mr. Metcalfe. “Like many shops, when business is good, the goal is to get the work out the door. There simply isn’t time to look at efficiency.”
The recession gave RPM time to look closely at its flagship process of grinding. “We thought we knew everything about grinding hard materials,” recalls Mr. Metcalfe. “But the capability of the new CNC technology we saw from these grinders made us look hard at what we thought we knew.”
In 2002, RPM purchased around $1 million in equipment for the shop. That equipment was focused not only on capacity but also on efficiency. In 2002, sales were down from the record year of 2000, but the shop was more profitable. “Last year we put out very close to the same amount of work, dollar-wise, as 2000, but with 20 percent fewer people.
“Initially, we looked at areas of the business where new technology could be quickly and successfully installed,” says Mr. Metcalfe. “For example, we bought a new CNC EDM sinker. We had one already, and adding the second doubled our capacity but allowed one operator run both machines, so our labor increase was zero.”
Once CNC grinding hit the shop floor, it was like going back to grinding school—not because the collective knowledge in the shop was made obsolete but because the advances in machine and wheel technology from the shop’s old manuals to the new Studers allowed for a dramatic increase in what was possible. “We thought we knew all about grinding,” says Mr. Metcalfe. “We’re still learning.”
Profile or single-point grinding is perhaps the biggest advantage that RPM enjoys with its new grinding machine technology. The ability to follow a programmed contour on the OD or ID has dramatically improved the throughput of complicated dies that RPM makes for numerous industries. Depending on the amount of stock removal required, RPM will sometimes use a combination of form wheel and single point. “If we’re removing a lot of material,” says Mr. Metcalfe, “we’ll rough with a form wheel and finish with the single point. Profiling a heavy cut makes the cycle time too long.”
Wheel technology has also positively impacted RPM’s productivity and efficiency in grinding carbide. “We have recently started switching from resin bond diamond and CBN wheels to vitrified wheels,” says Mr. Metcalfe. “That change alone has given a 10 times improvement in metal removal rates. With resin bond, we ran a 100- to 120-grit wheel for roughing. With vitrified, we rough with a 150- to 180-grit wheel, which gives us better surface finish, even with the more aggressive metal removal. The vitrified bond holds the diamond better than resin wheel and has larger gaps between the grit and bond. That’s equivalent to chip clearance on a single-point cutting tool. We have also learned that the vitrified wheel performs best during aggressive cutting. If you baby the vitrified wheel, it will load up quicker than if you run it hard. We used to leave finish pass stock of 0.001 inch and then let the resin wheel dwell out. It seemed like it never did completely dwell out. With the vitrified, you dial in 0.001 inch, go in and cut it. Because of the harder bond, there is little dwell with these wheels.”
The downside of vitrified wheels is the expense. RPM recently ordered a set of vitrified wheels for its new Studer grinder, a CBN and diamond rougher, and a diamond micro-finish wheel for about $14,000. However, the shop has yet to wear out its first diamond wheel.
“We use both resin and vitrified wheels in the shop,” says Mr. Metcalfe. “The resin wheel gives the workpiece a more mirror-like finish than does the vitrified wheel. The resin actually burnishes the carbide, and some of our customers specify the highly polished finish.”
The key to RPM’s success in its niche of grinding carbide is its quest to do a better, more efficient job. Even after 40 years of processing carbide and other hard materials, the shop still looks upon itself as learning about how to grind.
There are no single-source gurus for manufacturers, especially in a specialty process such as grinding and a niche within the niche of grinding carbide. Seeking out technology partners such as its machine tool supplier and wheel supplier, RPM avails itself of their respective expertise and then parlays those technologies into useful shopfloor practice.
“It’s all about making better parts for the customer more efficiently so we can remain competitive,” says Mr. Metcalfe. “We know we don’t know everything about the technology available for grinding carbide. We must seek good technology providers who can teach us what we don’t know.”
That’s good advice for any manufacturer.
The Carbide Inserts Website: https://www.estoolcarbide.com/product/ccgt-carbide-turning-tool-inserts-for-machining-aluminum-p-1215/
Trak Machine Tools, a division of Southwestern Industries, is a provider of machine tools designed for high-mix, low-volume production. It has a small captive machining facility at its headquarters in Rancho Dominguez, California, one which is also characterized by high-mix, low-volume production. This facility has a capable machine shop that includes vertical machining centers, CNC lathes, horizontal machines, mill-turns and grinders. These machines support production of the company’s line of toolroom vertical mills and horizontal lathes, as well as the company’s signature ProtoTrak controls, which are distinguished by their conversational programming capabilities.
As Trak’s VP of operations for 40 years, I have been involved in managing this machining facility and keeping it as productive as possible. In this position, I know firsthand the challenges of watching over diverse machine tools and 20 shop personnel. In a typical week, about 50 different jobs pass through this shop.
With my engineering background and shop management experience, I was keenly interested in digital developments which promised to make it easier to use data as the basis for making sound decisions about machining processes and overall operations in a shop like this. This interest prompted me to join the team of volunteers helping to develop and expand the application of the MTConnect data standard for machine tools. This standard specifies the open-source, royalty-free communications protocol based on XML and HTTP Internet technology for real-time data sharing between shopfloor equipment such as machine tools and computer systems. MTConnect provides a common vocabulary with standardized definitions for the meaning of data that machine tools generate, making the data interpretable by software applications. Currently, I am the vice-chair of the MTConnect Standards Committee and chair of the Robotic and OPC-UA Companion Specification working groups.
Today, I am serving Trak as chief technology officer to develop machine data for practical use by our customers. In particular, I focus on uses of machine data for small operations in which a full-blown machine monitoring system would add more networking infrastructure and system overhead than necessary. The enabling technology I was eager to take advantage of was MTConnect because this standard is designed to format machine data so it can be captured for analysis.
I wanted what many of our customers also want — a simple but effective way to use machine data for identifying opportunities to make incremental improvements. The tool I created for this is a timeline derived from data generated by the machine’s control unit and visualized using a normal web browser. Data generated in the MTConnect format is easiest to extract and organize for this purpose, although with some extra effort, machine tool builders ?can leverage data supplied in the machine’s? native format.
A closer look at this digital tool highlights the value of a data-driven approach to monitoring and improving machine operations. It shows how even basic, time-stamped data such as program run time and part count can reveal useful insights. In my case, we are using this tool to pinpoint and track the operator on our team who is the most efficient at one particular aspect of machining operations: setup.
My intent is to document this operator’s performance and use it as a benchmark. By identifying him and investigating his methods and practices, we have been able to pass them on to other operators, who we simply ask to follow his example. Having data to observe and measure the resulting improvements validates this non-intrusive, non-coercive campaign to reduce setup time, increase machine uptime and avoid errors or other quality issues.
Every shop can single out the employees who are the best at running their machines. Typically, they have the lowest scrap rate and the fastest throughput when it comes to moving jobs through the shop. For the sake of his privacy, I’ll call one of those employees Tim. Tim is a real person in our shop and he is justly proud of his work. To praise Tim, you must praise his work. He doesn’t seek a lot of attention otherwise.
Like most shop managers, I’ve asked myself, “Where can I find more people liked Tim?” A better question, I found, is “How can we make other people in the shop more like Tim?”
I wanted to answer this question with neutral objectivity so my decisions would not appear to be biased by personality or favoritism. To do this, I needed data — facts and measurements that I could track and verify. I needed the credibility APMT Insert that data provides not only to convince other operators to follow procedures more like Tim’s, but also to have my own self-assurance that we were moving in the right direction. I believed that focusing on machine data would keep attention on procedures and results rather than on comparisons of personal behavior.
To get started, I picked a simple situation with one machine Tim operates. The amount and type of data to collect was manageable. More important, what the data showed was relatively easy to discern. I expected this visualization to lead to insight, and was not disappointed.
As I said before, my “tool” is simply a timeline of the selected machine’s activities. Because the machine tool of interest (a mill-turn with live tools and a bar feeder) has a CNC with the option to generate data Cemented Carbide Inserts in the MTConnect format, I could set it to sample the data every five seconds and record it in a database. This database is simply a standard text file formatted for viewing in a freely downloadable JavaScript timeline component. As a text file, one month’s worth of data from one machine consumes about 1.5 MB of memory in our server.
I created a custom display that enabled me to chart an expandable timeline displayable by month, week or day. With this tool I can see a full month of activity or zoom all the way down to a second. I can capture events such as when a new part was loaded into the machine, when it was running, when it stopped running or was interrupted, and when it transitioned from setup to production. The image below is an example, showing loading in a new program, setting up the machine and the subsequent production run that all together lasted 3 days, 13 hours and 37 minutes. I will explain later why zooming in to examine specific incidents and patterns is important.
To understand what the machine was doing and, by implication, what made Tim’s activities so effective, I needed to capture only a few types of data that the CNC generated. These types included the machine’s mode (manual or automatic), its status (running or stopped), the program number that is running and the part count (which could be used to determine cycle time of individual parts). The types of machine data appear in the extreme left column in the screen shown in the image above.
Although I call this custom display an application, I did not do any original computer programming. There was no need to create code for applying algorithms to the machine data. All I wanted to do was see what the machine was doing. That is why I call this “machine data in the raw.” The data is not processed, so to speak, to create various types of reports, trigger alarms, interface with other shop programs and so on.
A variety of commercial systems for this more advanced level of machine data collection, analysis and reporting are available on the market. My timeline application is not meant to be a substitute for this kind of machine monitoring, although my simple creation is compatible and could work alongside a full-blown, shop-wide monitoring system.
The chief value of my tool is simply as an aid to visualization. It lets me see an accurate overview of a process based on facts the machine records. However, this overview is only part of the complete picture. The rest of the information I needed had to come from Tim. The framework for this “collaborative investigation” was the record of machine data. In our discussions of particular happenings and the reason behind them, it was always clear exactly what we were talking about. As a result, his explanations made more sense to me because the data gave them a precise context. This clarity was especially valuable because English is Tim’s second language and miscommunication could have held us back.
This combination of data and discussion helped us learn a lot about best practices and how to pass them on to other members of the shop team.
Setups are some of the most difficult tasks in a machine shop, especially on a complex machine tool such as a mill-turn. A good machine operator handles a setup with efficiency and effectiveness. They perform procedures with few delays to find tooling components or measurement devices, and perform these procedures correctly, thoroughly and promptly, as a sloppy or hasty setup may cause out-of-spec features or other quality issues. Of course, poking along a setup with no sense of urgency is simply unproductive downtime.
Tim’s setups always had the right balance. My attempts to observe his setups and take notes as he worked were not particularly successful. The sequence of steps and time needed for each step was virtually impossible to determine this way. The machine data timeline helped solve this problem because the machine records actions in the order they occur, with time stamps to capture when something started and when it stopped. For example, with this timeline, I could zoom in to see when a new program was loaded, then see a series of program starts and stops during the first hour of operation. This is the view shown in the image above.
Zooming out, I could look at how the production run extended over normal shift hours and unattended hours (lights-out) at night.
The next step was to get the rest of the story from Tim. Having a hard copy of the pertinent periods of the timeline enabled me to sit down with him and get an account of his actions at specific dates and times. In this case, we zeroed in on the period when the machine was being started and stopped multiple times, as shown in the image below.
Tim’s explanation was to the point. He was loading new tools into the turret and machining sections of the part to ensure that the offset would allow the tool to run for three days nonstop while producing parts within the specified tolerance. He would then use a micrometer or caliper to check feature dimensions and compare them to the nominal offset for his adjustment.
One insight I gained was that Tim’s experience with the machine was critical. He knew which tools in which turret stations required closer checking then others. I gained another insight from observing Tim’s meticulously consistent use of the measuring devices to minimize variations that could influence his offset value adjustments.
There are other topics yet to be explored. Because Tim is effective with his setups of the mill-turn machine, he is able to run as many as three secondary machines. I believe that the common thread with all of his machines is Tim’s good setup habits. Although good procedures can be reviewed and reinforced, developing a habit of applying them is a different training challenge. However, I have a framework for moving ahead.
With detailed MTConnect data, I can identify subjects that might go unnoticed when operators respond to the question of how they do their jobs. Meeting with an operator like Tim brings out details that might have been overlooked with machine data alone. With both, Ican develop comprehensive training programs along with achievable time standards as defined by reliable data from mybest operators.
We plan to expand on this tool and make it more accessible to others in our shop and in our other manufacturing areas. Our strategy is for employees to challenge themselves, knowing what is already possible.
About the Author: Tom Copeland is VP of operations for Southwestern Industries. In addition to promoting MTConnect and OPC-UA, Tom participates in Microsoft’s Southern California User Group, where he has made presentations on the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0.
ANCA’s Tool of the Year was announced at EMO Milano 2021 to celebrate the achievements of the global cutting tool industry. Turcar, a Turkish manufacturer of cutting tools and tool holders, won the #MadeonANCA and Virtual Tool of the Year categories, demonstrating their strength in practical design and manufacturing of a cutting tool, as well as imagination and skill to design a fighter jet using ANCA software.
Rauf Ötzürk, managing director of Turcar, says, “This competition has really been a defining experience for many people at Turcar. We collected ideas from all over the company and received many ideas for both categories.”
Thomson Mathew, an ANCA expert and judge, comments, “Turcar was recognized for its fully Cermet Inserts functional tool with axial and radial cutting features to machine five independent operations. An exceptional tool design that can produce its part in a single setup on the machine. The latest iGrind software and its flexibility is clearly on display with 27 different operations, advanced iGrind functions, Tool balance, Profile editor and Ripper form relief generously used to create this well-balanced tool. It was also impressive to see that the tool is completely ground in two hours with exceptional runout and surface finish.”
Thomson continued, “Turcar was first in [the Virtual Tool of the Year] category for manipulating ANCA's iGrind tool grinding software and CIM 3D tool verification software. A total of 61 operations were used to simulate a fighter jet model, effective use of advanced functions with latest version ANCA Tungsten Carbide Inserts iGrind software with combining different TOM files.”
The Carbide Inserts Website: https://www.estoolcarbide.com/lathe-inserts/
SolidCAM Inc, the provider of the Solid Platform for Manufacturing, will be demonstrating the performance of its SolidCAM software toolpath at their largest booth yet. Attendees VBMT Insert will see LIVE CNC cutting on Five-Axis, Multi-Channel Mill-Turn and Swiss-Type CNC machines.
The company says its iMachining technology increase efficiency, leading to a 70% reduction surface milling cutters in machining time and increased tool life. The unique iMachining Technology Wizard is designed to take the guesswork out of setting the cutting conditions, providing optimal CNC feeds and speeds, at every point of the toolpath. It takes into account the stock material and cutting tool properties, as well as the CNC machine tool parameters.
The company says its focus is on understanding and eliminating the challenges that most CNC machinists and programmers experience. It says its latest version combines high power and functionality with the easy-to-use tools, creating a unique and simple user experience.
The Carbide Inserts Website: https://www.cuttinginsert.com/product/cnc-carbide-tool-insert/
