Double Tracking means that the knurling wheels are not tracking properly. In this situation, the knurling wheels will create a different pattern than the original design and may overlap or "double die"

There are two main causes of a knurling tool double tracking: 

1. The knurl wheel isn’t set deep enough into the workpiece.  Dorian Tool recommends increasing the depth. The knurl depth should always equal 35% of the knurl pitch.
2. The circumference of the work piece blank is not a multiple of the knurl pitch. To correct this, you must change the before-knurl diameter of the part or select a knurl wheel with a different pitch.

Dorian Tool  has developed a “Knurling Calculator Spreadsheet” that can calculate all of the parameters to avoid double tracking.

If you would like to request an electronic copy send us a note in the comments section below or, for faster results, in the form you get when you click the button below.  We'll quickly get a spreadsheet sent over to you!

EZ Burr was tasked with deburring a series of internal ribs in a very long high-silicon aluminum engine block. A special extra-long (14” OAL) Carbide Series tool with a rear cutting only inserts was required to get down into the internal ribs for the deburring. 

​If that where the only parameters to that need to be met it would be a challenge.  The customer also needed cycle time to remain at 12-15 seconds while running at 1250 RPM and 15.750" IPM. 

EZ Burr had to make an extra length tool that could handle these cutting conditions without adding any cycle time to the process. The insert had to produce a clean, smooth surface and run a consistent number of blocks each and every shift.

The initial testing resulted in a built up cutting edge on the inserts. EZ Burr's solution involved working closely with thier coating vendor to apply the perfect coating to the inserts to get the desired results.

​In the end, the tool design, cycle time and performance all met the stringent requirements as specified by our customer. We also made sure to always have a batch of these specially coated inserts ready for release at our local distributor, and enough long reach arbors on hand at EZ Burr to have ready to deliver in less than 2 weeks.

If you have an unique deburring application, get in contact with one of our F&L Technical Sales team members!  We'd love to help you out!

Hannibal Carbide has assembled a very nice overview of some common problems associated with carbide reamers and how to avoid them.

​McLean, Va. (April 8, 2019) – Manufacturing technology orders totaled $337.2 million in February 2019 accounting for a 15 percent decline from January and a seven percent decline from the previous February, according to the latest USMTO report from AMT. The year-to-date total was $735.2 million, less than one percent off the year-to-date total at this point last year.
 
“It’s important to look at the February numbers in context. It’s true that order levels declined, but from the second strongest January in the history of the USMTO program. They’re still at good levels compared to this time a year ago,” said Douglas K. Woods, President, AMT. “Other indicators signal continued manufacturing strength. AMT members are generally positive heading into the second quarter; the U.S.-China tariff negotiations look to be moving toward a successful conclusion; and the March ISM Manufacturing PMI showed expansion which beat analysts’ expectations and rallied the stock market. However, uncertainty lingers on issues such as tax, trade and the budget, and continued inaction in Washington could stall already sluggish growth.”  
 
While companies in many industries reduced their orders in February, the nearly 50 percent decline in orders placed by the Aerospace as well as Engine and Turbine industries led the downturn between January and February.  The Automotive sector recorded a modest double-digit uptick. Bucking the general trend, February 2019 had a notable expansion in orders from Commercial and Service Industry Machinery Manufacturing such as Water Treatment and Commercial Cleaning Equipment. The big gain was the result of large orders in the Great Lakes area and the West. 
  
Four of the six USMTO regions had fewer orders in February than January, with the largest decline coming from the Southeast. In the West, metal cutting orders rose slightly. However, declines in Forming and Fabricating lead to roughly stagnant orders compared to the previous month. The South Central region outperformed all other regions, with orders expanding by over a third from January 2019 led by growth in Oil & Gas, Contract Machining, and Food Processing Equipment sectors.
 
Capacity utilization had a second month of declines in February, settling at 77 percent, off the post-recession high of 77.8 percent in December 2018. Despite an increase in orders from the Automotive Sector, Light Vehicle Sales rebounded to 17.477 million annualized units in March. March Manufacturing ISM® Report On Business® registered a Purchasing Manager’s Index of 55.3 percent, an expansion of 1.1 percentage points over February, signaling underlying strength in the manufacturing sector.

Cold Forming Taps, also called Roll Taps, create threads by extruding the material in the drilled hole up into the thread form instead of removing material.  This leads to a stronger thread because the material rearranges the material in the hole. Tap life is also increased because you are forming the thread instead of cutting the thread so there is nothing to wear out at the cutting edge.

Roll Form Taps are en excellent choice for nickel based alloys that are prone to workhardening.  The cold forming process causes the substrate material grain structure to be re-arranged and "squeezed" into the thread form. This cold working will increases the hardness of the substrate material.

The following information is courtesy of Allen Benjamin .

Horn USA is very excited about their future home!
They would love if you stopped back here to check in on their progress!

The HHorn USA construction camera was installed on September 11, 2019.  The construction camera takes pictures at the top of every hour.  An image taken within the past hour will load first.

Feel free to use the camera controls to view any of the images that are archived and feel free to share this page.

If the preview does not load, please visit the Horn USA public page on EarthCam.

MCLEAN, Va. (December 9, 2019)
U.S. manufacturing technology orders totaled $376 million in October 2019 according to the latest U.S. Manufacturing Technology Orders (USMTO) Report published by AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology.

October orders increased 2 percent over September 2019. New orders placed in October 2019 fell 21 percent from October 2018, which was one of the best Octobers in USMTO history.

Despite month over month gains, the gap between the year-to-date totals grew larger with the addition of October data. Orders placed to date in 2019 totaled $3.75 billion, a decrease of 18.4 percent from the annual total through October 2018.

The industrial machinery manufacturing sector experienced robust growth in October 2019. Orders from machine shops grew at a modest pace but have not returned to their later-summer levels. The automotive sector increased orders by about 40 percent in October, while the aerospace sector decreased orders by slightly over ten percent.

“Since March, job shops have accounted for an unusually large share of orders, reflecting the fact that large players deflected capital spending decisions to their sub-tier supply chain,” said Douglas K. Woods, president of The Association For Manufacturing Technology. That trend began a reversal in October, however, as companies of all sizes placed orders.

Our research and the data point to a shifting of capital investment activity from small companies downstream to tier two and one suppliers. Based on quotations activity, orders in November and December are likely to be from larger companies expiring their capital spending budgets rather than small manufacturers continuing to invest at their second and third quarter rates.”  

“It’s clear that a lack of stability in the market coupled with the shifting winds on trade issues are dampening U.S. manufacturers’ enthusiasm for investing in new capital equipment. At the same time, we are nearly half way through the Tax Reform’s five-year window of providing lower tax rates and investment incentives.

The former creates instability, and while the latter should be creating an urgency to invest, our analysts and leading industry economists believe that the confluence of drivers will yield a positive impact on the market in late 2020 and throughout 2021.”  

From: Aerospace Manufacturing Magazine
by : Mike Richardson, September 2018

Mike Richardson meets JJ Churchill’s executive chairman, Andrew Churchill to hear about the latest developments of its aerofoil blade machining techniques with the help of a new workholding concept called Blue Photon.

A first-tier expert in the production of gas turbine blades from forgings, castings and solid billet, JJ Churchill says it has halved machining operations on specific critical parts using Blue Photon technology – which is marketed in the UK and Europe by NCMT.

Blue Photon technology enables engineers to realise benefits not possible previously with mechanical fixtures alone. JJ Churchill has utilised the Blue Photon technology in an innovative way to deliver huge productivity benefits for its customers.

Here, the technology is applied to a titanium aluminide aerofoil blade component which is an extremely difficult material to fixture and machine. Blue Photon fixes the component to the workholding fixture with an adhesive, which when cured under UV light, is strong enough for the most rigorous machining techniques including 5‐axis CNC. The process is a replacement for encapsulation, providing reduced fixture complexity.

“You can often see real value by looking outside your sector at the typical technologies used on the products you make instead of just within your supply chain – it’s what I call horizontal innovation,” begins JJ Churchill’s executive chairman, Andrew Churchill. “Workholding is a classic example, i.e. how well a company can drive its process and quality performance is directly connected to how well it can repeatedly, robustly and rigidly hold the workpiece it is machining, otherwise it will never achieve a process-capable machining solution.

“We’re very interested in how we can best hold aerofoil blades. They possess a beautiful, sinuous shape, but are very difficult to clamp efficiently. Conventionally, a blade is secured using hard-point fixturing and a clamping solution which is expensive to make and has numerous drawbacks. Alternatively, the blade can be encapsulated by being placed in a mould and adding a low melting point metal or resin alloy, which takes it from a sinuous aerofoil shape to a solid block. This is expensive, and the design of the encapsulation fixturing is complex because it requires cooling water channels and electrical contacts, as well as moving parts and a decontamination at the end of the process.”

"A technique derived from prismatic machining, when exposed to UV light, the plastic polymer cross-links and sets. We pick up the datum points on the blade forging which allows us to use Blue Photon plastic glue to adhere a new set of datum points through a metal fixture with sapphire waveguides onto the blade. And because it’s a square shape, it can be clamped much more efficiently. After blade machining, the glued-on metal datum block is simply removed and the finished blade product is washed off with warm water. It’s a radical approach – we’ve taken Blue Photon’s licensee, NCMT’s intellectual property and developed the know-how for aerofoil manufacturing applications.

“In terms of benefits, we no longer need to design a complex and expensive encapsulation fixture, we can machine more faces of the blade, we’ve removed the slow-melting alloy encapsulation and part decontamination processes. Combined with other novel manufacturing processes such as additive manufacturing removes substantial amounts of lead-time from the new product introduction (NPI) process. Typically, we remove a quarter of the lead-time and about a quarter of the cost of NPI on a blade using the combination of Blue Photon and additive manufacture of coordinate measuring machine (CMM) fixtures. It’s incredibly powerful because if you can respond rapidly to NPI, you stand a better chance of getting the volume work of an aero engine programme.”

Once the blade root and tip have been machined, the workpiece is transferred to one of JJ Churchill’s Starrag LX051 5‐axis machining centres. The workpiece is held in specifically‐developed fixturing for the fast and effective complete machining of the aerofoil from forged blanks that are, at most, 5mm oversize.

“We’ve had Starrag machines for well over ten years, but we work with a relatively small number of top-notch, global machine tool suppliers. It’s really important to develop a deep relationship with those suppliers. We will visit them at least once a year to get involved with their R&D activities, so that we understand what is coming through as potential opportunities. We could wait and see what the large OEMs are pushing in terms of technologies – or we can get aggressively involved, help them solve some of their problems and get the opportunity to be partner with them on some of the technical developments going forward. We’ve done this very successfully in a number of areas.

“We usually get two years of advance notice of winning volume production contracts on any given programme. Volume production means building a bespoke cell, which requires investment and poses the question: in terms of single-piece flow, what is the best technology to drive global cost-competitiveness and process capability for this specific customer? We have a shortlist of potential machine tool suppliers where we can form a partnership, sign a non-disclosure agreement and put the supplier alongside our engineers to develop a proposal. This can form the basis of a long-term contract. We will then build the production cell and deploy it.”

ll this talk of the potential volume production hints at product process capability and robust process stability. How much importance does Churchill place on Industry 4.0, automation and the advent of ‘smart tools’ in general?

"We produce gas turbine blades for engines that will be in service for decades. If we’re still making them the same way whilst competitor economies like Germany continue to drive the application of Big Data and Industry 4.0 as a productivity advantage, then the UK will eventually lose out.

“More in the ‘here and now’ is automation. The use of robotics in a high labour cost economy will have its place – and the UK is a high labour cost economy. We’re looking at how we can link together our VIPER grinding centres and CMMs and automate them. The first step is a ‘pick and place’ robot: a robot arm and end-effector selects a turbine casting, places it on the grinding machine, removes it on completion and places it on the CMM. This offers some advantages but it’s not really earth-shattering.
“The real value is gained with closed-loop adaptive machining. The robot does what I’ve just described, but when it gets to the CMM, the CMM talks to both it and the grinding machine and says for example, ‘this is a nonconforming blade, there is a material-on condition, so we need to re-program and postprocess back to the grinder and remove more material from these features’. Completely without human intervention, this closed-loop output from the CMM is fed back to the CNC grinder, regrinds that blade and re-measures it to establish that it now conforms.

“This is adaptive machining. Even more exciting is where there are upper and lower feature control limits. If that feature is beginning to drift inside the upper and lower control limits, the operator will either take action or simply wait and see. However, in a closed-loop adaptive environment, if the feature begins to drift, the output from the CMM data linked into the VIPER grinding machine can adjust accordingly to make minute incremental offset changes and nurse it to hit closer to nominal all the time. This is what we will be doing and we’ve already designed a cell which is ready for the robots and designed with closed-loop adaptive machining in mind.”

Churchill then poses a relevant question: what does this mean to employment? After all that has already been discussed, it doesn’t surprise me to hear him say that as a rapidly growing business, JJ Churchill will be re-deploying its employees internally and re-skilling them accordingly.

“Companies will need to accurately plan a growth curve so that they can redeploy their labour. We want to take the experience our workforce has gained over the years and keep it, but retrain and augment it with the kinds of skillsets that will be needed to get the most out of digital manufacturing.

“We will also be looking to ensure our apprentices join us with ‘digital-ready’ skills. We’ll need people with grinding skills and those of being able to interact with robotics and programming, whilst operators with lower skillsets can be employed to ensure the cell is fed with raw material. It will require huge changes in our industry’s skillsets and it’s one that we’re eyes wide open to, but it will be a challenge for our sector as a whole in moving forward.”
www.jjchurchill.com
www.ncmt.co.uk

Weldon Tool has announced a running change to the appearance of all Weldon Premium carbide endmills regarding raised land transition area from the back of the clearance face to the flute.

This design change also provides an appearance more consistent with most all tungsten carbide endmills.

Weldon further states: "This is only a functional appearance change. Both internal and customer field tests have confirmed that users will still experience the same outstanding performance of Weldon Premium carbide endmills as they have in the past."