Manufacturing provided financial stability for America’s middle class by employing as many as 17 million people annually from mid-century through the end of the 1990s. At its peak in 1953, the sector accounted for 28.3% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and, together with agriculture, employed one of every three American workers in the…
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A day doesn’t go by that I don’t hear about a CNC application. CNC machines are used across EVERY industry! They rely on computers rather than humans to produce at enormous speed and accuracy. So, what is A CNC? A CNC is the automation of machine tools by means of computers executing pre-programmed sequences of machine control…
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Downtime on the manufacturing floor is inevitable. Mechanics need to repair machines, perform inspections, or upgrade the entire plant. If the professionals in your organization don’t regularly repair and inspect machinery, downtime can be painful. In fact, top performers’ unplanned machine shutdowns take only 3% of run time while bottom performers double that amount. During…
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Humans have documented their interest in flight since the ancient Greeks told the myth of Daedalus, who fashioned wings from wax and feathers so he and his son, Icarus, could fly away from the Labyrinth. Unfortunately, the story didn’t end very well for Icarus, but it does illustrate how long-held a dream flight has been…
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It’s the fad that’s been sweeping schoolyards and offices everywhere – the fidget spinner with the industrial center. While originally developed in the early 1990’s, fidget spinner toys suddenly seem to everywhere, in the news, in all sorts of retail establishments and especially in schools. The modern cousin to the worry stone and stress ball, the…
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One of the most common terms you will hear our technicians cite within a root cause failure analysis report is something called a stress riser. We are often asked what this term means and how did it result in a failure. In this article we will go over the definition of a stress riser and…
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Ultrasonic welding is an industrial technique whereby high-frequency ultrasonic acoustic vibrations are locally applied to workpieces being held together under pressure to create a solid-state weld. It is commonly used for plastics, and especially for joining dissimilar materials. Ultrasonic welding is, by definition, a noisy affair. Through the use of high frequency and high energy…
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In the movie Apollo 13, NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz told his team failure was not an option when it came to getting the crew of the damaged Odyssey spacecraft back home. The same is true in the manufacturing world — except you’re not rescuing three astronauts who are over 100,000 miles from home. Still,…
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If you’ve ever been involved in construction, you know it can be time consuming, expensive, labor-intensive and much more. These qualities make it necessary to streamline and simplify the process, and one of the most common and effective ways to make the process easier is prefabrication. Prefabrication enables process standardization, reduces costs, improves construction quality,…
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Like any tasty recipe, manufacturing business leaders need a few main ingredients to start things off and maintain strong consistency as they add more products to their offerings. For manufacturers, this means establishing plant efficiency and productivity. If you remove one ingredient from either the recipe or the manufacturing plant the results can be problematic,…
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