July PM News

Grand Opening Showcases Headquarters

BIG Kaiser Precision Tooling welcomed customers and partners to its new headquarters’ grand opening on April 29-30. The 2-day event showcased the new 33,000 square-foot facility located in Hoffman Estates, Ill. Highlights included a 5,000 square-foot product showroom, a training and presentation room and an in-house repair center.
“Our new headquarters will strengthen the level of engineering and product support we can offer our customers and partners,” says BIG Kaiser president, Chris Kaiser.
Tooling and workholding demonstrations were running on three machining centers, and technical seminars were scheduled every hour throughout the event. Presenters included BIG Kaiser engineers and product specialists, a round-table discussion with end users, DMG/Mori Seiki USA VP of Engineering Greg Hyatt, Mazak Machining Center Product Group Manager Mike Kerscher and metalworking industry forecaster Steve Kline from Gardner Publications, PM’s parent company.

Software Manufacturer Receives Certification

PartMaker Inc.’s latest release of its PartMaker suite of CAM products has been certified for use with Auto-desk Inventor 2011 solid modeling design system by the Autodesk Inventor Certified Applications Program.
To attain this certification, the PartMaker suite of products met certain criteria and demonstrated a high level interoperability with Autodesk Inventor 2011. The certification is granted by Autodesk only after the product has been approved after a rigorous testing process.

PartMaker users can directly import Autodesk Inventor files in their native *.IPT format. 2D files are imported via a *.DXF interface.

80th Anniversary

Citizen and Miyano Machinery announced their respective 80th anniversary at a time when the two companies have joined forces. Citizen used its know-how and techniques acquired in the manufacture of Citizen watches to develop precision industrial machinery known in the industry as CINCOM (Citizen Numerical Control Machinery). Miyano was a file manufacturer and made its own automatic lathes to produce file wheels for use in cigarette lighters. This eventually led to the manufacture of a variety of machine tools.

Name and Logo Change

Founded in 2002 as Genevieve Swiss Industries Inc. to market tools and accessories for Swiss-type machining and advanced small parts manufacturing, the company will now market itself as “GenSwiss” as expressed with its new logo.
“Through the years, using the domain name ‘genswiss.com’ and with our customers and our own personnel referring to us and our products as ‘GenSwiss,’ it became logical to go forward with ‘Gen Swiss’ as our brand identification. It captures the core of who we are, with our exclusive marketing relationships with PCM, Utilis and others.

We provide a spectrum of tools, accessories and solutions for manufacturers and job shops using Swiss-type machine tools,” says Jim Gosselin, founder and president.

Missler Software and SimCon Join Partnership

Missler Software and SimCon have announced a technical and commercial partnership between the two companies who work respectively in the design and manufacture of molds and plastic simulation.

The direct link with the CadMould software allows TopSolid customers to directly benefit from the advantages of plastic simulation. This new partnership offers TopSolid’Mold users an optimized tool for the design of plastic parts and can be used as a first step in determining the feasibility, quality and cost of designing their parts and injection molds.

According to Marc Choquin, French sales director, “It is logical for Missler Software to work closely with SimCon, a simulation provider, to offer our customers the most modern and optimized tools on the market for mold design.”

Paul Filz from SimCon says, “SimCon is very happy to work closely with Missler Software and its customers on this project. Moldmakers now have optimized mold design tools at their disposal with TopSolid’Mold and Cadmould 3D-F. Contact TopSolid at TopSolid.com.

Company Expands

Business growth has necessitated the addition of a 7,000-square-foot showroom at Ganesh Machinery’s headquarters in Chatsworth, Calif., in order to house its extensive manual machine tool line.

The company began in 1985 as a machine tool distributor selling manual lathes and milling machines from a 1,200-square-foot facility. The following year, the company started doing CNC retrofits of knee mills and added Teach-Lathes to their product line-up. By providing customer satisfaction and customized manufacturing solutions with its full line of manual and CNC lathes and milling machines, it has been able to grow the business into a provider of sophisticated machine tools, the company says.

Westec Goes Biennial

The Society of Manufacturing Engineers’ Westec Advanced Productivity Exposition will become a biennial event. The long-time exposition, which has served as the definitive event for West Coast manufacturers, will alternate years with SME’s new AeroDef Manufacturing event. Westec 2012 is scheduled for March 27-29, 2012, at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
A redesigned, content-rich Westec 2012 will have an emphasis on best business practices, adopting the latest technologies for emerging industries, according to SME.