Every CNC machining engineer knows that you need the right tools to do a good job. Having a good range of tools makes your life so much easier, and you more efficient.
It’s best to start out with a small collection that grows as you become more experienced. As you learn from the skilled colleagues around you, they might even let you borrow some of their tools, as long as you look after them.
If you were advising a young machinist who is just starting out, which tools would you recommend they buy?
We have put together a list of the 10 basic tools we think every young machinist should have. If you have any recommendations to add to the list, let us know!
Great to have both metric and imperial as some raw materials are still manufactured in inch sizes. Always comes in handy when planning your work and materials. Great when setting tools, vices with parallels & manufacturing work holding.
You will use this every day for working out conversions, calculating feeds and speeds, trigonometry and when programming. Especially useful when planning jobs and estimating production times and costs.
Not something you will use every day, but very useful for setting vices square, concentricity checks, and very accurate measurement of edges and depths. Can be used for inspection of some machined features on the machine.
Go for a good quality caliper, as it will make a difference in the accuracy of your measurements, and it will last longer too. An essential tool for accurate measurements when setting the machine and checking dimensions.
Machining centres can do a great job of deburring components giving a nice consistent neat finish with nice clean chamfered edges. But there will normally be features that need to be deburred by hand, so it is especially useful to have a good set of various deburring tools.
A good quality set of needle files is essential for deburring fine detail and edges. Have a good range including flat/pillar, half round and round in a 2nd cut grade. If used correctly you can get a good clean consistent chamfer or radius on most edges.
It’s good to have a couple of different size precision engineers’ squares. These can be especially useful when checking machined faces for squareness, checking raw material faces or cut faces. Also, useful when marking out work pieces before cutting or machining.
A machinists handbook contains a wealth of useful information, from conversion table, formulae and equivalent charts to material data and feeds and speeds. A ‘must have’ for all engineers, apprentices / trainees and machine shops.
A toolbox is essential, allowing you to organise and protect your tools, and it is really handy to be able to find what you need straight away. You don’t need to spend a lot of money initially, but it’s useful to have a few drawers so that you can lay your tools out, and have space for additional kit. It’s surprising how your collection of tools will expand over the years.
It’s a day all about creating supportive communities by having conversations with family, friends, or colleagues about mental health.
Conversations about mental health have the power to change lives. Recent research shows how important open conversations are to support everyone’s mental wellbeing.
We took time out of our workday this morning to stop, share coffee & doughnuts and have a non-work-related chat. Light Bulb Coffee arrived with freshly roasted coffee beans ready to brew up our favourite drinks along with a tray of delicious Pippin’s doughnuts.
Of course, you don’t have to make it a special event and it doesn’t only have to happen once a year, we want everyone to feel comfortable talking about mental health – whenever they like.
By encouraging our team to take #timetotalk we can help support each other and help to create an environment where we can talk openly about mental health and feel empowered to seek help when we need it.
As a business we intend to make this part of our culture. Our team are fundamental to our success and by offering help or advice to support them in and out of work, promotes wellbeing, happiness, and motivation. We may not always have the answer but with external resources we can help point them in the right direction.
There is no right way to talk about mental health; however, these tips from Mind Charity & Rethink Mental Illness can help make sure you’re approaching it in a helpful way.
- Ask a question and listen – asking questions can give the person space to express how they’re feeling and what they’re going through. Try to ask questions that are open and not leading or judgmental, like “how does that affect you?” or “what does it feel like?”
- Think about the time & the place – sometimes it’s easier to talk side by side rather than face to face. So, if you do talk in person, you might want to chat while you are doing something else.
- Don’t try and fix it – just talking can be really powerful, so unless they’ve asked for advice directly, it might be best just to listen.
- Treat them the same – when someone has a mental health problem, they’re still the same person as they were before. If you want to support them, keep it simple. Do the things you’d normally do.
- Be Patient – no matter how hard you try, some people might not be ready to talk about what they’re going through. That’s ok – the fact that you’ve tried to talk to them about it may make it easier for them to open up another time.
We also donated the same amount spent on our coffee and doughnuts to the two charities’ supporting this event.
In any business one of the most expensive and common problems is related to efficiency and waste. Lean manufacturing is documented as being the process of minimising waste which in turn should maximise productivity.
What is Lean Methodology anyway?
Simply put, Lean operates on two important principles:
- Always striving for improvement : This should be part of the culture and expectations and sought out by everyone every day.
- Maintaining respect for people : Each worker is unique and should be treated with respect and helped to fulfil their capabilities. Communicating with everyone the company goals, plans and results makes sure everyone is on the same page.
For companies to succeed with the Lean approach, they must ensure their business model prioritizes those principle.
Our company core values and monthly team meetings already covered the second principle however we needed training and guidance to help us identify tools to enable us to make a ‘continuous improvement’ approach natural to our team.
During 2020 Adcutech decided to start working with SWMAS Ltd looking into how we could adopt a ‘lean’ approach and soon realised that waste it is not just related to scrap parts.
There are in fact 8 wastes.
There is the obvious one already mentioned, scrap parts, but also waiting and delays – as parts move from section to section are there bottlenecks or hold ups, movement of people – how far does each individual have to walk to get tools, to clock on to the next job, to find material for the job they are working on?
These are all things that were taken for granted as part of our day-to-day role, until they were highlighted as potential issues and in turn areas of improvement that could help with efficiency and the limitation of waste.
Focusing on the 8 Wastes our team has started to make small but beneficial changes to the way we work.
The Adcutech management decided that improvements should be driven by our team on the shopfloor. They are the staff that work in the production environment and therefore have hands on experience of niggles & gripes or areas that could be improved to make their working day more efficient and in turn improve productivity.
We have a Lean ‘champion’ that rallies the team together to discuss ideas, generate suggestions and plan the implementation of changes.
Starting small and looking at the most obvious, easy to change frustrations the team have already completed three projects and are discussing adaptations to develop one of them even further.
Initially calculations are suggesting that these small changes will save 47 hours a year. That is more that 1 week of production time, by making some quite simple changes to the layout of our shopfloor.
Discussing and celebrating our successes at our monthly team meetings seems to be energising our team to think bigger and the list of projects they want to tackle is growing.
We plan to adopt this approach in every area of the business.
We still have work to do with SWMAS with more training planned and more tools to learn, when the COVID restrictions are lifted, but we have started 2021 with a positive approach and a common goal to improve efficiency across the business. Our team understand ‘it’s not about working hard, but about working smarter’.
Our productivity just keeps increasing, along with the speed of our milling capacity on our turning centres, up from 6,000 to 12,000 RPM. We won’t need second operations on our milling centres going forward.
Our new CMZ TA-20TY-400 is proving to be a dynamic investment, increasing productivity and further advancing efficiency and our machining capabilities. Despite the challenging and unprecedented times, we are pushing forward with significant plans to become more efficient as we strive to give our customers the best possible service. These ongoing improvements and developments will further enhance our already skilled, talented and dedicated workforce.
We have already seen the benefits of the high speed milling capabilities of the CMZ, with an 18% reduction in the machining cycle of a regular customer component, not only allowing us to pass on a cost saving to the customer but also enabling us to free up machining capacity.
For anyone that is looking for a rigid, precise and reliable machine the CMZ TA range is ideal. With driven tooling at 12,000 rpm and the turret cooled with oil, bidirectional and interpolated laser compensation in all axes, including the C axes and integrated oil-cooled spindle motors increase precision and surface finish in machining. These are a range of machine that should definitely be considered when you need to increase productivity whilst producing high quality components.
We always strive to give our customers the best possible overall service and we’re looking forward to implementing our strategic plan which will ensure this continues.
