Articles
Design, manufacturing and commissioning decisions explained through practical work. Understand the problem before commissioning a solution.
Production decisions
An RFID encoding line was producing half of what it could. The transport was ready to advance; unseen retries were holding it back. Solving that doubled output and meant rethinking how the product was checked.
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Inspection software gets all the attention. But no algorithm can fix a camera that sees differently at nine in the morning and six in the evening. The physical environment must be designed, not improvised.
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Six machines in the same family, built one after another. Each solved a problem its predecessor had encountered in production. The greatest return came not from the new machine, but from applying what had been learned to those already working.
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A mixed batch, good and bad parts that look identical, and a 0.02 mm difference that jams downstream equipment. How to separate them, and what the first prototype teaches you that the drawing cannot.
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Returning it is the right answer on paper. But sometimes the return costs more than the defect. A simple tool, designed in hours, can make the difference between stopping and keeping deliveries moving.
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Three machines destined for scrap because their consumable was discontinued. Four years later they are still printing. The decision was not about technology: it was about judgement.
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The usual mistake is not automating too late. It is automating the wrong action.
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Detecting the fault is the easy part. The difficult part is deciding what the system does when it finds one, and getting that right.
Read the articleParts, materials and finishes
A waterjet quotation can look like a giveaway compared with a machining quotation. And it is, because you are not comparing the same thing.
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A discontinued spare, with no drawing or data sheet. Before machining anything, one question needs answering: what is this made of?
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It comes out wrong. You can finish it on the mill and accept it, or discard it and start again. The criterion I use is not purely functional, and I think function should be even less of the sole deciding factor.
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A small machined part comes out with tool marks. Polishing is not always necessary: sometimes a uniform surface is enough. For that, microblasting is the quickest option there is.
Read the articleWorkshop practice
On a machine with printheads, every head replacement can mean setting up from scratch. Or it need not. The difference is whether the design separates the part that wears out from the part that locates it.
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A reel-fed printing machine needs to know where each piece starts. Usually, a printed mark tells it. When that mark disappears, the reference must be found in the product itself, and that changes more than you might expect.
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You order 10 mm aluminium and receive 10.10. It is not a supplier error: it is how commercial stock works. Program for 10 and the part pays for it.
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You have tried three different strategies and the defect appears in exactly the same place. That is not bad luck: it is information.
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If the cutter is 80% of the thread diameter, the cutting edge travels five times faster than the centre. Programming without correcting that relationship breaks tools and leaves no clue why.
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The model is correct, the geometry is correct, yet the toolpath crosses something it should not touch. It is not a software fault: that strategy is not looking at what you think it is.
Read the articleYour next step
Tell me what is happening, what you need to achieve and what you have tried. We can then look at a specific intervention.
