With the recent increase in manufacturing in the United States, many companies are finding it difficult to find and hire qualified CNC people. It should come as no surprise that skilled people who were laid off during the recent economic downturn have moved on to other careers—and probably wouldn’t come back to manufacturing on a bet. So we’re left with an entirely new employment pool that is made up primarily of people with little or no previous manufacturing experience. And companies are scrambling to get them trained.

One source for trained people is your local community college or technical school, many of which have recently brought back or upgraded their manufacturing programs. If you haven’t already, you should definitely get to know what they have to offer. Indeed, you should do whatever you can to support the CNC-teaching schools in your area.

Ideally, you should be hiring graduates and sending new hires to the school for training. And you should be bringing in instructors from local schools to augment your own in-plant training by having them teach classes in your facility.

Your willingness to hire a school’s graduates assumes, of course, that you know, understand and agree with the materials presented by the school. That is, curriculum content must be appropriate to your company’s needs. I’ve been in several companies, for example, where managers are not satisfied with what’s being taught in the local CNC-teaching school, so they don’t support the school or hire graduates. If you fit into this category, don’t just complain, do something about it! Here are a few suggestions for how you can help your local CNC-teaching school improve its manufacturing program.

Get in Touch with the Key People
Of course, if you don’t know who to talk to, you really can’t do much to support the school. Make a simple phone call or browse the school’s website to find key people in the manufacturing program (commonly named Machine Tool Technology), including the dean of the department as well as instructors. Then contact these people. Offer your assistance, and ask how you can get more involved with the school. You may be surprised at how happy educators are to talk to you.

Get Involved with Advisory Committees
Almost all CNC-teaching schools have an advisory committee made up of key people from local industry. They help educators determine which specific topics to cover so that when students graduate, their skills match the needs of the companies represented on the advisory committee. Without the support of an advisory committee, educators are left on their own to develop curriculum materials, and what they come up with may not be appropriate for the needs of local industry.

Donate
Schools are always looking for items that will help maintain or improve their manufacturing classes. Machine tools head the list, as they provide the school with lab equipment to work on, but there are countless other items needed to keep classes going. Measuring devices, cutting tools, workholding devices and raw material for lab activities are always in demand. Most schools will be happy to accept just about anything you no longer need and will often arrange for the removal of unwanted items from your facility.

Provide Plant TCMT Insert Tours
Be willing to provide plant tours for current students as well as potential students considering a career in manufacturing. One school I know of uses a local company to demonstrate concepts discussed in class. The instructor provides presentations and practice on a given topic, then brings the students to the company to see how things are done in the real world.

Volunteer
Look for other ways your company can help. When the school holds an open house, be sure you are present and let attendees know about job opportunities at your company. If the school acquires new equipment, offer to help instructors learn how to use it. Let educators know they can call on you when they have a need that you may be able to satisfy.

An Added Benefit
Getting involved with your Cermet Inserts local CNC-teaching school will give you a hiring leg-up on other companies in your area. If you’re on the advisory committee, you will have a real say in what the school teaches, and you will know what graduating students can do for your company when you hire them. And if you are interacting at all with students, they will get to know your company. If they’ve toured your facility, they’ll have a good understanding of the working environment and what you expect of your workers.

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Brenner Tool is a job shop. fast feed milling inserts It’s a big job shop.

The 400-employee contract manufacturer in Croydon, Pennsylvania, has areas devoted to mold making, die making, production machining of small parts and production machining of large turbine parts on vertical lathes. It also has an aerospace division that includes machining as well as finishing processes such as anodizing. Each of these disciplines within the company could qualify as a significant enterprise on its own. But because they have been combined in one company—and because the company has been successful at encouraging employees from separate divisions to pool their experience—Brenner Tool benefits from synergies that help the company in all of its pursuits. Employees from various disciplines all teach one another what they know well.

The area devoted to production batch machining—part of the company’s mold division—illustrates how all of the different disciplines benefit. One example relates to through-coolant drills. When the production machining area had a need to begin using this type of drill extensively, it drew on expertise in the die machining division to use the tooling more effectively. Another example relates to vacuum workholding. The production area knew little about this technology, but the aerospace division knew a great deal. The aerospace group even provided one of its large-capacity vacuum pumps to take the place of an off-the-shelf pump that proved too small for the application the production area had in mind.

But a far more significant example of sharing expertise between disciplines relates to the employees themselves. Brenner Tool uses toolmakers—employees who developed their skills and knowledge in mold machining—to run batch production jobs.

The approach is precisely opposite that of a great many contract manufacturers. Many successful shops today have changed their processes on the shop floor to make them more rigidly defined, so shopfloor employees with less skill and experience can work effectively. Brenner Tool, by contrast, uses highly skilled production machining personnel in combination with a more open process. Toolmakers in this area are encouraged to take their own initiative to find more productive ways to machine each part.

For example, in his search for ways to machine a complex miniature gearbox more efficiently, mold division manager Mike Magas placed a sample of the part on every production employee’s desk.

"A dollar a minute" is a phrase he uses repeatedly when he seeks the toolmakers’ input in this way. The refrain is a reminder that even tiny efficiency improvements have value. The seconds add up . . . and the shop stands to earn at least a dollar more for every 60 seconds it can shave off of the entire production run for a particular batch of parts.

Mr. Magas says there are multiple reasons why a toolmaker can be particularly effective at finding more efficient ways to machine a production job. Any batch part is probably going to be part of an assembly, he notes. A skilled toolmaker is adept at the sort of "tolerance management" necessary to achieve the part’s required fit without spending the tolerance window too early in the machining process, and without spending time machining non-critical features to an accuracy greater than their function requires.

Another reason the toolmaker can perform effectively in this role has to do with managing setups. The toolmaker is used to looking at complex parts with an eye toward how to machine them with the fewest setups possible.

Toolmaker Dave Toppin jokes, "It’s really just a matter of being lazy."

Three recent production jobs show the kind of processing strategies the toolmakers use to run batches more efficiently:

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The search for commonality is an element of all of these processes. Separate units are machined in a single cycle, and family variations are machined on a common platform. A toolmaker is used to running parts in quantities of one. And as the first example illustrates particularly well, sometimes the most efficient way to machine a production batch is to transform that batch into a single piece.

However, the toolmaker is also no stranger to repetition. "I’ve worked on 80-cavity molds," Mr. Toppin says. "A job like that is a lot like batch production."

In other words, mold machining and production machining are not all that dissimilar.

Using high-skill employees on production jobs that are sometimes low in complexity does come at a cost, says Mr. Magas. He says Brenner Tool sees a return on that investment in several ways.

One benefit is the more efficient machining that results from having a larger number of experienced metalworking employees available to think about each job. In shops where the process engineering knowledge is located entirely in the engineering or programming department, jobs are often run inefficiently simply because there is a lack of time and lack of people available to imagine how to run them better. By contrast, the toolmakers at Brenner Tool often can’t help but to conceive more efficient ways to run the jobs that come their way.

Another benefit is the more efficient use of these toolmakers. The cyclical nature of Brenner Tool’s Tungsten Carbide Inserts mold business means the amount of mold machining work the shop has in-house at any given time can vary considerably.

But perhaps the most important return on investing more knowledge and creativity into how each job is machined is the stronger relationships with customers that result. "We want to look at each customer as a client who will continue to be a source of work in the future," Mr. Magas says.

The die components shown in Figure 3 illustrate this principle in action. Studying the entire family of parts let Brenner Tool engineer a single machining platform that works across all of the variations. In the future, the customer for this part may create more variations still. If so, there will be little question which shop is best prepared to take on the additional work.

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Bourn & Koch’s parent company, Alleghany Capital Corp., has acquired Coastal Industrial Distributors (CID Performance Tooling), and has formed a new holding company for its subsidiaries in the machine tool and consumable cutting tool sectors. Precision Cutting Technologies, the name of the new holding company, will include Bourn & Koch, Diamond Technology Innovations (DTI) and CID Performance Tooling.

“While the formation of Precision Cutting Technologies will not change the management of Bourn & Koch, DTI and CID, it places these companies under a single platform so that they can share resources and leverage their combined capabilities to provide an enhanced product and service offering to their customers,” says David deep hole drilling inserts Van Geyzel, president and CEO of CNC Inserts Alleghany Capital.

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GWS Tool Group has acquired North American Tool Corp. (NATC), the second bar peeling inserts such add-on acquisition in 2020 for GWS. With the addition of NATC, GWS says it strengthens its reputation as a multi-disciplinary manufacturer of high-performance custom cutting tools.

Located in Northern Illinois, North American Tool is a supplier of special taps, dies and gages. From solid carbide threadmills to high-speed steel taps and thread gages, North American Tool delivers specialized threading tools for applications across multiple industries, including automotive, aerospace, medical and general engineering.

“NATC is an exciting add for us,” says Rick McIntyre, CEO of GWS. “Their customer service model is one of the best in the business.”

“North American Tool is very excited to be joining GWS Tool Group, a company that embodies the attributes that have long made CNMG Insert us successful,” says Curt Lansbery, president and CEO of NATC. “We have no doubt that this move to join GWS will be positive for our associates and will ensure the continued growth of the legacy that we have worked to develop.”

The team at NATC will continue to operate from the Illinois facility as a manufacturing arm of GWS Tool Group, and the company expresses intent toward continued investment in the facility, machinery and equipment, and human resources. Customers of NATC are said to expect continuity of the NATC offering and customer service disposition under GWS ownership.

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The U.S. metalworking industry is red-hot. The Gardner Business Index (GBI): Metalworking averaged nearly 56 in 2017, which was easily the best year since Gardner Intelligence started the Index almost seven years ago. The Metalworking Index continued to increase in the beginning of 2018, hitting an all-time high of 61.3 in February.

The strong performance of metalworking facilities throughout 2017 resulted in a significant increase in machine tool consumption, as reflected by data from Gardner Intelligence’s latest World Machine Tool Survey. Machine tool consumption in the United States totaled $8.142 billion in 2017, an increase of 6.8 percent from 2016. This increase represented the fastest growth rate since 2011, and the second fastest since 2007.

While a 6.8-percent increase is commendable looking at consumption in the last 10 years, it is relatively low compared to, let’s say, a 60-year history of U.S. machine tool consumption. So, why do I say that the machine tool industry is booming?

In 2017, 12 of the top 15 countries that consume machine tools increased their consumption from the previous year. This occurrence is rather unusual: The last time this occurred was 2011. That year, all of the top 15 countries that consume machine tools increased consumption—the only time that has ever happened. However, the industry was then in the midst of a rapid recovery from the Great Recession of 2007. Since 1980, only six years saw more than 12 of the top 15 increase consumption. Before 1980, no single year showed that level of growth.

At the moment, I do not think the strength of the top 15 consuming countries will decline in 2018. We can make a rough estimate of machine tool consumption in a country by analyzing the trends in its money supply, industrial production and capacity utilization. This analysis indicates that it is quite possible for 13 of the top 15 countries that consume machine tools to increase consumption in 2018.

Indeed, the machine tool industry is booming, but not based solely on United States doing well. Rather, it is because almost all major manufacturing countries around the world are doing well.

Perhaps most importantly, China raised its 2017 machine tool consumption by $1.780 billion to $29.970 billion, an increase of 6.3 percent. This increase in Chinese consumption made China the 10th largest machine tool consuming country. Although China increased its domestic production of machine tools and consumed more of that output than in the past, it increased its imports significantly in 2017 as well. Chinese imports rose to $1.147 billion, an increase of 15 percent from the previous year.

The surge in Chinese consumption and imports has made it more difficult for U.S. metalworking facilities to get their hands on new machines. Even though the United States increased its imports by nearly 10 percent in 2017, it did not increase them as much as China did. This means that there were relatively fewer machine tools available for export to the United States

According to the International Trade Centre, the top five machine tool producers (excluding China and the United States) increased their exports to China by $192 million, while decreasing their exports to the United States by $126 million. The dramatic difference in the export numbers to China and the United States is attributable primarily to builders in Japan and Taiwan.

Japan is noted for its high-end machine tools, which usually top the selection lists of U.S. machine tool consumers. More of these sought-after machines went to China rather than to the United States in 2017. When these high-end machine tools are in short supply, U.S. machine tool consumers must move down their priority list. At these times, they typically look to countries such as Taiwan as a source for this technology. Although Taiwan did increase its exports to the United States, it did so at a lesser-than-expected extent in favor of increasing its exports to China instead. This shift makes sense as the two countries are much closer geographically and share the same roots in language and culture. As a result, fewer machines from Taiwan were available to U.S. consumers.

The net effect of these facts about consumption and import/export trends is that machine tools have been increasingly difficult to acquire in this country. However, there are other significant factors influencing the global supply of machine tools.

For example, global machine tool production increased rapidly in 2017. It went up by almost 7 percent, the highest rise in one year since 2011. This jump strained the supply chains of machine tool builders, thus creating a scarcity of many critical component parts such as ballscrews, guideways and base castings. Therefore, even though demand now calls for an increase in production, machine tool builders simply cannot comply because they cannot get the needed parts to make the machines.

Furthermore, electronics giants such as Samsung are dramatically increasing their capital equipment expenditures. A Wall Street Journal article from January 9 called “Tech’s Enormous Scale: Samsung Now Outspends Exxon and Shell Combined,” reported that “Samsung Electronics Co. spent more money on capital expenditures last year than any other publicly traded company.” The $44 billion total tops the combined capital equipment spending of the world’s largest energy companies. According to the article, Samsung plans to spend an additional $110 billion over the next three years. Much of this investment will go toward the production of memory chips for all those devices we carry in our pockets and wear on our wrists.

So, how does this contribute to the difficulty in getting a new machine tool?

Samsung, and other companies like it, are investing heavily in equipment? used to manufacture semiconductors. Most of Carbide Inserts these machines use the same guideways and other components as machine tools. This massive demand by technology companies soaks up critical parts for machine tools, further inhibiting machine tool builders from responding to the recent surge in demand for their products.

This development leaves U.S. metalcutting facilities struggling to acquire new machinery at a rate that is likely not fast enough to meet current manufacturing needs. So what can these companies do in the meantime to increase production and capacity?

Here are some questions that might give possible answers:

As you examine such questions, continue to go about your usual machine tool selection process, but be prepared to wait a little longer, pay a little more or go further down your selection list once you make a decision. While you are at it, shoulder milling cutters start thinking about your next machine tool purchase. At least in the United States, the red-hot machine tool market should cool a bit in 2019. That may provide the ideal respite for implementing new technology.

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