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Swarfcast

著者： Today's Machining World
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10月19日まで。※適用条件あり
Noah Graff, used machine tool dealer and editor of Today’s Machining World, interviews machining company owners, equipment gurus, and experts with insight to help and entertain people working in the machining field. We discuss topics such as how to find quality employees, customer acquisition, negotiation, and the best CNC equipment options for specific jobs. マネジメント・リーダーシップ リーダーシップ 経済学
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  • See the Part Before You Cut It, with Greg Walker and Bob Folts–EP 275

    See the Part Before You Cut It, with Greg Walker and Bob Folts–EP 275
    2026/10/06
    I was touring a shop once, and the owner told me the engineers can draw up whatever they want. It never comes out like that on the machine. At IMTS, I brought that up with Greg Walker and Bob Folts of Spatial Integrated Systems. They told me it can. As long as you’re honest with the software. Greg is president and co-owner of SIS, a Siemens partner based in Broadlands, Virginia. They sell and support Siemens software, primarily for aerospace, defense, and federal customers. Bob is their advanced manufacturing expert for federal work. He has over 50 years in tooling and defense manufacturing, and he started out cutting cams on Brown & Sharpe screw machines. ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! ************* Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link. . View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our YouTube Channel. Follow us on Social and never miss an update! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swarfcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swarfcast/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/todays-machining-world Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmwswarfblog ************* Highlights Your Machine, Not the Perfect One Everything starts with a digital twin. That’s a digital version of your machine, part, or process that behaves like the real thing. I asked what happens when the machine isn’t in great shape. Bob said you scan it and enter the kinematics. If the ball screws have backlash, you program the backlash in. Then the simulation matches what you’ll actually get. “You have to be honest with it,” Bob said. He says he’s in shops all the time explaining why their virtual results don’t match the real world. Usually it’s machine tolerances nobody put into the model. It works on old cam machines too. You model the cams, the throws, and all the parameters, then watch the machine run in the computer. Newer multi-spindles, including many INDEX machines, run Siemens controls that connect directly. Other controls need an edge device added to the machine. Watch It Cut First The workflow starts with the part in CAD. In CAM, the programmer lays out every operation from raw stock to finished part, and the software suggests toolpaths, passes, and speeds and feeds. Then you run the G code through the simulation. On screen, a 3D model of the stock gets cut as the tools change and remove metal. If you programmed something wrong or there’s a collision, it tells you. You fix it and run it again. Bob runs it two or three times before he posts it to the machine. You still mic the part afterward. Bob’s claim is that it’ll be very close, if not perfect. I asked whether I could override the software when I think I know better. You can. Bob admitted that sometimes his override was wrong. The force on the tool pushed the part out of tolerance, and he had to dial it back. “If you really listen to what the CAM system is giving you, you’ll come out with a good part just about every time,” he said. 135 Percent on the Way In Greg brought up a Siemens feature called adaptive control. The machine can come in at 135 percent, then drop to around 75 percent when the tool engages the part. The result is a faster cycle time and longer tool life. The Bigger Payoff Is the Factory Honestly, I wasn’t sure the ROI was there on a single machine. Somebody can always trial-and-error their way to a good part. Greg and Bob see the bigger payoff on a whole line. Bob’s example was an assembly line with people, overhead cranes, and a moving line, all in one simulation. At the show, Greg said they heard from more companies than ever that were expanding, building a new factory, or buying an old one. They wanted help setting it up with Siemens plant simulation. That lines up with our M&A work. More buyers are asking us to find them another factory. Once they buy it, they have to integrate it. Greg also made a point that this isn’t only for big companies. SIS works with startups putting $1 million to $5 million into a new operation and sells them the software at a steep discount. Question: Would you trust a simulation of your machine before cutting the first part? The post See the Part Before You Cut It, with Greg Walker and Bob Folts–EP 275 appeared first on Today’s Machining World.
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    48 分
  • Why Make a Robot That Looks Like Us, With Phil Zheng-EP 274

    Why Make a Robot That Looks Like Us, With Phil Zheng-EP 274
    2026/09/22
    A few years ago, Richtech Robotics would call hospitality groups and offer them robots. They got laughed out of the office. The answer was always the same. We’re a people company. Now they’re building an 8,000 square foot factory in Las Vegas. Three production lines for robots and sensors, all managed by AI. They’d planned it for 2027, but a new FCC rule made them move it up to this year. I talked with Richtech’s COO, Phil Zheng, at IMTS. He told me why their humanoid robots have eyes that don’t do anything. Why Chinese citizens might not love robots as much as they seem to. And why even the people building this stuff are surprised how fast AI and robotics are moving. ************* Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link. . View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our YouTube Channel. Follow us on Social and never miss an update! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swarfcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swarfcast/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/todays-machining-world Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmwswarfblog ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! ************* The Robot Has to Match the Data Standing at the Richtech booth, I asked Phil why the robots look like people. The eyes are the giveaway. He admitted straight out that they aren’t meant to do anything. His answer had three parts, and only one of them was about looks. The first is the work cell. Most jobs on a production floor are done by a person standing at a station using two hands. If you bring in a robot shaped differently, you have to rebuild the station around it. That costs money and time. A robot with two arms drops into what’s already there. The countertops are already built for us. The second reason is the one I hadn’t thought about. It’s the training data. Most robot training today comes from teleoperation, where a person puts on goggles and gloves and drives the robot’s arms directly. That’s where the data comes from. So the robot has to have the same shape as the person generating it. You can’t train a robot to work in a shape no human has, because there’s no human in that shape to show it how. The third reason is the simplest. People like it. They want the head and the eyes. They’ll give the machine a personality, or a name. Robots That Watch Each Other Work The humanoid is the thing people take pictures of, but it isn’t the whole pitch. Richtech’s robots are meant to work as a group. Phil walked me through the table. One robot does assembly and small parts handling, picking and placing, and it comes both mobile and mounted. You don’t want that one hauling things around, so delivery robots move items between stations. Behind them were autonomous pallet jacks for the heavy work. Tying them together is a fleet management tool and an AI layer that runs all of them. Every robot carries sensors and feeds data back. Phil’s argument for why that matters was the sharpest thing he said all interview. Right now a person does a step and hands the work to the next person, and nobody has real visibility into what happened in between. With robots, you can see the moment a screw went into a board and how long it took. The Las Vegas factory is where they prove it out. Sensor assembly on one line, robot assembly on the others, running by the end of this year. We’re a People Company The rejection Phil got in the early days wasn’t subtle. He’d call a large hospitality group that couldn’t fill its openings after the pandemic, offer them robots, and get laughed at. We’re a people company. He says that’s changed. Not because anyone got excited about it, but because people accepted it was going to happen anyway. I asked about China, since the usual story is that they want robots and we don’t. Phil pushed back on that. He’s ethnically Chinese and he was direct about it. He says regular people in China see robots the same way Americans do, as a threat to their jobs. The difference, he believes, isn’t enthusiasm. It’s that the government and the company owners have the power to install them, and nobody gets asked. In the US we argue about it out loud. The part he keeps coming back to is the speed. He says it’s moving faster than any technology of this magnitude ever has, and that it’s designed to only go faster. The post Why Make a Robot That Looks Like Us, With Phil Zheng-EP 274 appeared first on Today’s Machining World.
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    32 分
  • The Machinist with Purpose, with Doug Rizzo-EP 273

    The Machinist with Purpose, with Doug Rizzo-EP 273
    2026/09/08
    My guest today, Doug Rizzo, has been working in machine shops for over 55 years, and he’s only 62. Doug worked in his father’s company through good times and terrible, and did applications for Doosan. Now, he’s a plant manager by day and runs his own shop for six or seven hours at night. Doug says he loves all of it, from doing applications, to making fixtures, to cleaning oil off machines. He says it’s where he’s meant to be. It’s where he finds flow. ******** Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link. . View the podcast at the bottom of this post or on our YouTube Channel. Follow us on Social and never miss an update! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/swarfcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swarfcast/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/todays-machining-world Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmwswarfblog ************* Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion! Machinist Since Age 6 Doug Rizzo’s father owned a machine shop. He started on drill presses and Bridgeports at six. At nine he was running an NC-controlled lathe. Summer vacations, weekends, snow days. He was with his dad in the shop, Madison Sprocket and Gear. They ran Acmes, Brown & Sharpes, Wickmans. Many of those machines came from Graff-Pinkert, long before Doug and I ever spoke. Day job, night job Today Doug owns Franklin Lakes Machine, a contract shop with six CNCs in Englewood, New Jersey, ten minutes outside midtown Manhattan. By day he’s plant manager at Lentron Corporation, which makes components for elevators and escalators. At night he does what he calls a Clark Kent costume change and goes to his own shop to get parts out for next-day delivery. Weekends he’s around the New York metro doing applications and setups for other shops. He’s also helped a lot of guys get their own shops off the ground, applications and quoting and tooling, what his father called training wheels. When people ask if he’s arming his competitors, he says there’s enough pie for everybody to have a slice and you can come back for seconds. For now, the day job pays the salary and the insurance, and his own shop is the gravy. He never has to chase a raise. And if he’s tired, he doesn’t go in. The shop he didn’t get Doug worked for his father for about 30 years. Half a career in one building, and he always assumed he’d take it over. His father had a partner, one of Doug’s uncles. After Doug’s mother died, his father didn’t plan for what came next, and someone else came into the picture who didn’t see the business the way Doug did. The business closed in 2009 after roughly 48 years. Doug had power of attorney, so he took two CNC lathes he’d personally uncrated new and never wrecked, and paid a few dollars for them so his father’s partner wouldn’t be short. Then he put them in storage and went to get educated. For three and a half years he took short assignments on purpose. Six months here, six months there. Swiss machines in a medical shop. Boring mills in Pennsylvania. A packaging machinery builder. He was upfront with every one of them about what he was doing and nobody minded. In 2012 he went to Doosan as an applications engineer, and a number of those same shops became Doosan customers he’d walk in and get running. Where he’s supposed to be When there’s no work at his shop, Doug goes in anyway. He wipes down the machines and the toolboxes and sweeps the floor. He calls the shop solace. The sights, the sounds, the smells don’t change from one shop to the next, so walking into any of them feels like walking home. In his office he keeps a coffee maker, the cam software he’s teaching himself, the rocking chair his mother rocked him in, and a photo collage from his father’s 60th birthday. I asked him why he loves it this much. “I’m supposed to be there.” The post The Machinist with Purpose, with Doug Rizzo-EP 273 appeared first on Today’s Machining World.
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    47 分
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