As everything begins to open and we join each other for live events, the Governor of Missouri took time out of his busy schedule to acknowledge AGMA’s trade show and the need for more manufacturing in the U.S. 

Gain a basic understanding of steel and its properties. Learn to make use of steel properties in an application and understand the potential that different steel and heat treatment options can offer. Explore how performance of the material depends on how the steel is produced.

Cindy Bennett will retire as the AGMA Foundation Director on May 31, 2021. Bennett has served as the Foundation’s Executive Director for a combined 11 years, during two different tenures, with the most recent starting in 2014.  During her time at the helm of the Foundation she has done a tremendous amount for the gear industry. She build up the scholarship program, providing more than $300,000 in scholarships to students. The program has an 86% retention rate of graduated recipients working in the gear industry,. She oversaw the efforts to educate the industry on AGMA’s rich history, as part of the AGMA 100th anniversary celebration, including authoring “Celebrating 100 Years of Gearing, the History of AGMA,” published in 2016.
 
 
 

Yahoo! News
NASA is assembling a crack team of private companies to help it return humans to the Moon for the first time since 1972. After assigning SpaceX the task of the lunar landing, the agency is turning its attention to surface transportation. NASA has picked General Motors and regular defense contractor Lockheed Martin to develop Artemis program’s lunar vehicles.

Manufacturing Business Technology
Canpack is a Krakow, Poland-based manufacturer of aluminum beverage cans, glass bottles and other food and drink packaging. This week, the company announced plans for a new $380 million manufacturing facility in Muncie, Indiana. By the end of 2023, the new 862,000 square-foot plant could create 345 new jobs.

Manufacturing Global
Exploring the role that digitalization, lean manufacturing and workplace safety plays in the future transformation of manufacturing and economic regeneration, General Electric (GE) and the Global Manufacturing and Industrialization Summit (GMIS) via their joint thought leadership and shared knowledge are collaborating to support global manufacturers in this discovery.

Aerospace Manufacturing
The US Air Force wants to acquire at least 145 B-21 Raiders from Northrop Grumman, estimated to cost in excess of $90 billion. President Joe Biden’s nominee to be the next secretary of the air force, Frank Kendall, says that “is a reasonable number, at this point.” Kendall’s comments were made during a confirmation hearing for his new post at the Senate Armed Services Committee in May.

Barron’s
American producers of everything from airplanes to agricultural machinery had a banner month in April as new orders and shipments hit their highest values ever, the latest sign that the U.S. and global recoveries continue to accelerate. The outlier? The motor vehicle and parts industry, which continues to suffer from a shortage of microprocessors.

Automation.com
Data from automation systems used to stay put. It was produced by sensors, PLCs and reorders; stored on local OPC servers and databases; and accessed by a few skilled operators and engineers. Although highly secure, data access was limited. Smart Manufacturing and IoT are driving a variety of positive business outcomes and data must be shared with new systems, new networks and a variety of tools for diverse users and roles.

The Boss Magazine
More women in manufacturing can power the post-pandemic boom. Even as the trend toward automation has accelerated, people are still needed to do the job. Cobots help with repetitive tasks and precision in hard-to-reach places, but they’re so named because they collaborate with humans as part of an overall process. A skills gap could lead to 2.4 million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the U.S. over the next seven years, which would gum up the works and stall progress. Opening the industry to more women in manufacturing could go a long way toward closing the gap.

Robotics Tomorrow
Q&A with Jon Pearse, Owner and President of Pearse Betram+ Streamline Contract Manufacturing. They are a provider of end-to-end innovative automation and process control solutions and contract manufacturing services.

Manufacturing.net
Communication in the manufacturing workplace, whether on the factory floor or in the warehouse or stockroom, is essential. However, it is also challenging. Since the coronavirus outbreak, manufacturers are also required to operate in compliance with additional guidelines regarding social distancing and wearing of PPE, which only further complicates communication challenges.

Gear Solutions
Forging has long been used to manufacture gears, particularly in the production of gear blanks, which often uses open-die forging, closed-die forging and hot upset forging. Other gear forging processes include normalizing, gear shaving, grinding machining, turning machining, hobbing and shaper machines, and heat treatment. High-energy rate forging is also used to manufacture near- or net-shape gears by precision forging. With the high-energy rate forging process, a closed-die hot or cold procedure in which the work metal is deformed at unusually high velocities, the forging’s final configuration is developed in one blow, or a few blows. The ram’s velocity, not its mass, generates most of the forging force.

Modern Machine Shop
Some CNC machine shop leaders have had an education in Bitcoin digital currency, but for the wrong reason: They have been forced to pay ransom online for sensitive data that had essentially been held hostage by hackers. An anecdote about one of these incidents was shared by Olson Custom Designs, a shop specializing in defense-industry contracts. Although the company’s own data security has never been compromised, it has heeded the first lessons of incidents experienced first-hand by team members at their past employers.

Manufacturing.net
Global pandemic. Vital component shortages. Workforce challenges. A canal blockage. What else could the last 15 months have thrown at the U.S. industrial sector? Through all these challenges, manufacturing has responded with solutions. Here, supply chain experts and leaders discuss where these situations have taken the sector, and where we can go from here.

Gear Technology
AGMA presents its latest webinar “How Software Can Level the Playing Field for Robot Integration” on Wednesday, June 2, from 1:00pm – 2:00pm. READY Robotics has created a drag-and-drop programming interface that takes the coding out of the equation for automating the gear manufacturing factory floor. This solution works with a variety of robot vendor machines, does not require a lot of robot experience to learn, and is well suited for low volume, high mix production needs of the gear industry.

Gear Technology
Gear grinding comes with unique production challenges. Customers often request higher and faster speeds for continuous generation gear grinding. They also struggle to find a balance between productivity and quality requirements. While many applications are utilizing fewer gears in their equipment, the quality and production values continue to increase. Therefore, the gears found in the automotive, aerospace and industrial segments in 2021 need to cost less, reduce gear noise and work as efficiently as possible. 

Today’s Motor Vehicles
Robot orders in the first quarter of 2021 were up 20% over the same period in 2020, with substantial increases in purchases coming from companies in metals (up 86%), life sciences/pharmaceutical/biomed (up 72%), food & consumer goods (up 32%), and other non-automotive industries (12%). According to industry stats announced by the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), North American companies purchased 9,098 units valued at $466 million in Q1, with non-automotive companies purchasing 28% more robots over Q1 2020 and automotive OEMs and component suppliers combined seeing a 12% increase year-over-year.

The Additive Report
Constructing impossible parts from equally impossible materials is the work of one man — and he’s not the only one traveling the “impossible” road. Because of him and his traveling companions, AM, and impossible materials, the world will be far different in a decade or two. The materials are called refractory metals. Elemental stuff like tungsten, molybdenum, and niobium. Metals so strong, tough, and heat-resistant that they’re damned near impossible to machine. Printing them, however, is seemingly no big deal.