Don Terrill’s Speed-Talk

smeg wrote:Yes,
Some have an advantage where they can digitize on a seperate machine while they are cutting on the cnc.
I was told not to go that way as it can/does induce errors from machine to machine.

Digitizing in the spindle significantly increases your digitizing overhead / costs.
If that spindle isn't cutting heads its loosing money, .. ..
Example is my shop is very one off custom oriented,
and it works for me to digitize in the spindle, .. however I still loose money / production when I do.

brad_m wrote:For as long as we all keep giving in to the customer, we will be under charging for our time and knowledge.
I don't do any performance work for anyone but myself and friends.
I do own a mechanical repair/servicing shop.
I don't give in to the customer I set my pricing and if they don't like it, I will tell them to find some one else to do the work.

It's a long hard road to building a quality customer base, But it's starting to pay off. I would be easier if half the other places in the city weren't stuck in the 90s with their hourly rate and being to scared to lift the price.

This is so completely true, .. and something I hear ring through this industry all the time.

Production CNC machines can have mutiple tables so you can just index the next work piece to the cutter position. These are industrial CNC machine centers made for specific parts (rods) made by Excello. At CAT/LaGrange we have 5 running 24/7. The engine block cnc is also mutiple table and has a 24 hour cutting program for a single block. In both cases, a close watch is kept on tool life change outs. Curtis is right. That spindle has to be cutting all the time. Only the lowest cost, highest quality producer gets to go to work tomorrow. Expensive junk won't cut it.

RAS wrote:Perhaps in the future 3D printing will be another way to create custom parts. It's new technology but, the rate it's being developed is amazing. The new materials that can be used is a growing list that now seems endless. I'll bet we'll see intake manifolds that would otherwise never be built because of this technology. Among other things.

We are still a long way from using this technology for anything other than R&D, they are still quite slow and can be quite costly per part. In saying that though, as you pointed out, with the range of materials available to these machines growing every day, one off manifolds etc can be reproduced fairly simply. It's just not going to be an inexpensive exercise! We have 3 printers at work that use the fused deposition modelling process and makes parts out of ABS plastic. With the very few jobs we have done for industry, we've charged out at 0.60 cents per cc of material to basically cover costs (I work in education).

I think right now the most exciting capability that AM brings is ability to directly build wax patterns for investment casting.
Complex and semi-blind features that are impossible to machine, and difficult to do with sand casting, are easy.
Scaling the master for shrinkage, making detail changes on the fly, adjusting for local warpage, building integral sprues and risers,
all part of the package.

No tooling charges.

Someday we will build direct to metal, but in the meantime, this is still a game changer.