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Upbeat in Pittsburgh

At the end of April I had the opportunity to attend the National Technical Conference sponsored by PMPA. We stayed at the Pittsburgh Hilton, which overlooks the golden triangle where the Allegany and Monongahela rivers flow together to form the Ohio. Being from Cincinnati, it’s cool to see the beginning of the river that plays such a major role in my city’s history.

As usual, the PMPA staff, led by Monte Guitar, put together a relevant and thought provoking program for the attendees. I especially like the format for the tech conference because it uses a combination of presentations and hands-on workshops that really involve the attendees and let hangers-on like me listen and learn from industry veterans.
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Transferring to Faster Change-Over

One typical argument against the use of transfer machines in a shop has been lengthy setup times. It’s no surprise that excelling at long-running, high-volume jobs, as these machines are known for, might come at a price. But the fact that shops are trending toward lower-volume work these days is not lost on the suppliers.

Buffoli Transfer S.p.A. now offers the Trans-Bar flexible multi-spindle non-rotating bar machine that is designed to combine the benefits of both a traditional transfer machine and a dual spindle CNC lathe.
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A Fix for Rigid Tapping Errors

Although it is a well-known fact that no one or nothing is perfect, there is comfort in knowing that there are ways to compensate for some imperfection, especially when dealing with machine tools.

Most CNC machine tools now offer rigid tapping capability as a standard feature. A rigid tapping cycle synchronizes the machine spindle rotation and feed to match a specific thread pitch as the tap is quickly driven in and out of a hole. Since the feed into the hole is synchronized, in theory, a solid holder without any tension-compression can be used.

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