PM Blog

Sunnen raised $102,000 during its 30th annual Engine Charity Sweepstakes held at the Performance Racing Industry (PRI) trade show, beating its previous record of $59,000 from 2015. All proceeds went to Victory Junction, a camp for children living with serious medical conditions founded by NASCAR’s Petty family.

This year, the prize was a high-performance engine valued at more than $66,000 built by Sonny’s Automotive Racing in Lynchburg, Virginia. The custom-built 727-cubic inch engine included Sonny’s fully in-house ported hemispherical cylinder heads, a Sonny’s/Brodix 5.000 B.S. block, a Bryant billet crank, Carrillo steel billet rods, and more.

Are you planning to attend PMTS 2019 this year? If so, don’t miss the PMTS Tech Talks to learn more about specific products and processes. The Tech Talks are brief, interactive presentations held on the show floor by industry professionals and leading equipment suppliers that will give attendees the knowledge to help improve their company’s processes.

John Detterbeck, president of Lester Detterbeck Enterprises, will give a presentation called, “Skiving and Shaving, Similar but Not the Same” that will highlight the similarities and differences between the two processes. He will discuss real world examples and show how making the right selection can affect the outcome. Listeners come away with a list of rules they can use to get the best results when faced with the decision to skive or shave. This Tech Talk will take place Tuesday, April 2 at 1 p.m. in the Tech Talk Theater in the back of Hall A.

When visiting company booths at trade shows, it’s not always possible to see demonstrations of the latest equipment from exhibitors in their booth. Often, booths are busy with people asking for quotes, making connections or retrieving basic information on the technology. However, PMTS’s showfloor demonstrations are scheduled opportunities for attendees to see technology live without other distractions in the booth.

Index Corp. will use this component to showcase the true potential of a multi-spindle lathe with two slides per station and backworking capabilities in its PMTS booth 5013. Michael Huggett, national sales manager, Index USA, will demonstrate how the company’s MS16 6-spindle lathe can machine one of these components every 6.2 seconds, despite the part’s varied features. Produced from 16-mm barstock of free-cutting steel, this part specifically highlights the benefits multi-spindle technology can provide to automotive manufacturers; though, according to the company, the capabilities of the machine will be of interest to any shop producing medium to large quantities of small, complex parts.

Each January I review online traffic statistics for Production Machining’s previous 12 months of blog posts to determine which posts got the most attention. It’s an opportunity for us to learn more about what topics best serve our readers. I also like to share the information to provide our readers a chance to revisit the hottest blog topics of the year. Here’s the Top 10 list:

10. Shop Finds Success in the Dark

Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division has announced the formation of a Production Software business, comprising Vero Software, FASys and Spring Technologies. The move, under which the three acquisitions adopting Hexagon’s corporate identity, reflects Hexagon’s broadening expertise in the production technology space.

Hexagon acquired Vero Software, a specialist in CAD/CAM software, in 2014 and has continued to expand and diversify its offering. The 2017 acquisition of FASys brought tooling and resource management software and shop-floor automation and integration expertise into the portfolio. Spring Technologies, acquired in 2018, provides CNC simulation technology for G-code verification and workflow optimization. Hexagon combines components of these technologies to develop solutions for reverse engineering and on-machine measurement.