PM Blog

Lights-out machining has moved beyond a goal and into reality over the past decade. Advances in techniques and reliability of capital equipment are fueling the proliferation of unattended production.

Earlier this month, KC SmartPort held its seventh annual industry briefing in Kansas City, Missouri. This edition, titled Digitize, featured a panel of industry leaders from manufacturing companies including Honeywell, Mars Wrigley Confectionary U.S., Kawasaki Motors, and Magna International, a mobility technology company and one of the world's largest automotive suppliers. The panel addressed a crowd of more than 550 attendees, discussing how the rapidly changing field is moving towards automation, with big data facilitating great leaps in process improvement.

Shops that want to meet tolerance requirements for part prints may be forced to change from traditional turning operations to complicated and expensive processes. Profile tolerance capability, roundness and cylindricity capability, small step test results and machine rigidity and design requirements to achieve precision are all topics that can benefit shops looking to make this change.

Organized by AMT—The Association For Manufacturing Technology, the Smart Manufacturing Experience—held April 30 – May 2, 2018, at the Boston Convention Center in Boston, Massachusetts—provides hands-on, live technology demonstrations, active learning labs, collaborative technical workshops and tours of smart factories. It highlights transformative technologies such as additive manufacturing/3D printing, automation, advanced materials, precision machining, precision measurement/3D scanning, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and digital manufacturing and designed to provide easy, efficient solutions for applying those technologies to improve manufacturing speed and performance.

If you are not already convinced of the benefits of attending, here are five reasons:

Many habits are hard to break. Manually programming a machine tool as complex as a multi-axis Swiss-type lathe shouldn’t be one.