Miles Free Director of Industry Affairs, PMPA
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.
Read More
Craftsman's Cribsheet: Relative Machinability of Materials
Machinability of different materials is generally expressed as a percentage compared with a known standard.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
Good News from the Employment-Population Ratio
The employment-population ratio is a useful indicator and currently a positive one.
Read More
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.
Read More
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?
Read More
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.
Read More
12 Cardinal Rules for Shop Safety
Here are 12 simple rules to help eliminate accidents and injuries in the workplace.
Read More
