Miles Free Director of Industry Affairs, PMPA
Indicators that Drive Your Shop’s Performance
There are indicators that drive what gets managed in our business. What indicators do you follow to drive your company’s performance? Are they the correct indicators for what you are trying to achieve?
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Craftsman's Cribsheet No. 60: Decarburization and Your Precision Machine Shop
Most defects in steel workpieces encountered in precision machine shops are longitudinal in nature. While their presence alone is enough to concern us, for the purposes of corrective action, it becomes important to identify where in the process the longitudinal imperfection first occurred.
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Craftsman's Cribsheet: Relative Machinability of Materials
Machinability of different materials is generally expressed as a percentage compared with a known standard.
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What Machinability Means Depends on Where You Are
I am often asked my opinion about a material’s machinability, and I have found that I have to assess the person’s motivation, job title and location before I can answer the question.
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7 Causes of Quench Cracking in Steel
Failures of steel parts in service or production occur infrequently. However, when steel parts fail, the consequences are dire. Here are seven ways that steel can fail as a result of quench cracking from heat treatment.
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Technology or People?
In your shop, do your people operate your machines? What impressed me the most was the implicit, built-in assumptions at HORN that it was the people leading the machine tools, rather than the machine tools leading the people.
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Stress Cracks in Steel Bar Products
Stress cracks are often seen in locations that experience bending or straightening. They are also referred to as “cross cracks” or “transverse cracks.” Originally, they were identified in mill billet and bloom products prior to rolling.
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Precision Machining Industry Outlook: You Should be Bullish, Too
To sustain our businesses successfully, we need to intelligently manage risk, but for too many years, we have been conditioned by the market and the federal government to hunker down and try to avoid all risk.
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Good News from the Employment-Population Ratio
The employment-population ratio is a useful indicator and currently a positive one.
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Craftsman's Cribsheet No. 55: The Eight Wastes Found in Business and Manufacturing Processes
In “The Toyota Way,” author Jeffrey Liker lists and discusses the eight non-value-adding wastes that can be found in business and manufacturing processes.
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Expand Your Focus from Products to Service
Why shouldn’t we focus on the products that we make instead of the products we sell? After all, that’s what our customers buy from us, right?
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Stress Cracks in Steel Bar Products
Micro-examination can help determine crack origin by noting orientation, intergranular nature, presence of scale, presence of subscale, and additional microstructural characteristics can reveal the thermal history of heating and cooling at the crack location.
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