Nov 9, 2022
Today, companies that use CNCs find it nearly impossible to hire qualified CNC operators in the numbers required. As a result, they are hiring people with limited or no shop experience and training them from scratch. One area that poses special challenges for new CNC... 
Nov 7, 2022
Surface plates provide a large, flat reference surface that can be extremely useful for inspecting incoming, in-process or finished parts. The surface plate is often referred to as the foundation of measurement since it provides the reference for much of the layout... 
Oct 12, 2022
Surface finishing is a vital part of many manufacturing projects. How the exterior surfaces of a part or component are made ready for use is important to the manufacturing process. Once a surface is ‘finished’, it will not usually be subjected to any other processing.... 
Oct 10, 2022
The increased use of additive manufacturing (AM) in the aerospace and medical markets fosters a growing need to finish the surfaces of additive parts to meet final application requirements. Since the additive manufacturing process is capable of producing components... 
Oct 5, 2022
Toolcraft made a leap from manual machining and basic CNC technology to a sophisticated turning cell and has not looked back. It’s been a customer driven transition. So much of the work that a metalworking shop does is application dependent. For shops, the... 
Oct 3, 2022
Circles are a frequently produced form in the shop. Many different processes generate this form — including turning, milling, centerless grinding, boring, reaming and drilling — and there are a variety of gaging methods used to measure inside and outside diameters... 
Sep 14, 2022
Over the years, this column has examined using air gaging and back pressure to measure small bores (under 1 mm/0.040 inch). Air gaging can be an acceptable way of measuring small bores, but it does not provide any form information; it only provides the flow area as... 
Sep 12, 2022
Micrometers and calipers are essential tools in the manufacturing world. They are versatile and cost effective. For many applications, especially those at inspection stations where variety outweighs volume, they are the tool of choice. They also have kept up with... 
Sep 9, 2022
Differential gaging usually refers to the process of using two sensing devices and combining the results into one measurement. The measured dimension is the change in the position of the two sensing components. I’ve noted previously that differential gaging has some... 
Sep 7, 2022
There is a wide range of precision measuring tools and gages that should be considered as basic requirements in a metalworking operation for ensuring good quality control (QC) processes. Most gages are available in analog (mechanical readout) or electronic (digital... 
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