AGMA
The American Gear Manufacturers Association is providing its quality courses live, online. In August, you can take High Profile Contact Ratio Gearing and learn to identify what an HRC gear is and understand when to use them. Learn to recognize the detailed tooth geometry requirements to achieve optimum gear performance; and classify the changes required to successfully rate HCR gears.

Industrial Machinery Digest
Manufacturers are facing new challenges as they look to restart or maintain operations during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As preparations are made for the “next normal,” manufacturers must consider additional dimensions of employee safety, including the establishment of production environments and workflows that address physical distancing requirements.

Forbes
In manufacturing, the operational experiments of March and April are settling into something closer to a steady state. By now, most organizations have had a chance to take stock of what worked and what didn’t. And they’ve had a chance to adjust their operations and roadmap to a future where the only certain thing is uncertainty.

Thomas Net
Thomas recently conducted a survey that indicates that although many companies have paused their apprenticeship programs, quite a number of them are still offering these programs. In fact, it was found that more than half of the apprenticeship programs offered were not affected by the pandemic.

Metrology News
Groupe Renault and Google Cloud have announced a new industrial and technology partnership to accelerate the digitization of Groupe Renault’s industrial system and of Industry 4.0 transformation.

Gear Technology
When the management at Toyota’s engine and power transmission manufacturing plant in Walbrzych, Poland, looked to increase the availability of its production lines and improve the transparency of data, it faced the challenge of not only ensuring the implemented network would offer the necessary performance, but also of integrating multiple devices from a range of different vendors.

Gear Solutions
For applications with a high manufacturing and surface quality, high quality steels show a high potential for increasing the load carrying capacity as well as power density.

AGMA
Our next trade webinar is August 5 at 1:00 pm Eastern. Join us for National Security Reviews of Foreign Investments in the United States: What U.S. Companies and Overseas Investors in the Bearing, Gear and Related Industries Need to Know.

Detroit Free Press
The city of Sterling Heights — with support from Macomb County and the state of Michigan — is boldly raising its hand to be considered for the future home of the U.S. Space Command. It is the newest of 11 unified combatant commands in the Department of Defense and will help the military forces defend the nation’s interests in space.

Seapower Magazine
The Defense Department is taking another Defense Production Act Title III action to shore up the nation’s shipbuilding industrial base in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The action is one of seven recently announced by the Defense Department “to help sustain and strengthen essential domestic industrial base capabilities and defense-critical workforce. These actions will help to retain critical workforce capabilities throughout the disruption caused by COVID-19 and to restore some jobs lost because of the pandemic.” 

Fiat Chrysler press release
In a major step as they move toward the completion of their 50:50 merger as defined in the Combination Agreement announced in December 2019, Peugeot S.A. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV announced that the corporate name of the new group will be Stellantis.

Breaking Defense
Air Force acquisition head Will Roper is worried that without a new approach to aircraft development that incentivizes more companies to participate, the ever-shrinking U.S. defense industrial base may force DoD to nationalize major programs in the not-so-distant future.

Today’s Motor Vehicles
Eaton’s Vehicle Group has been leveraging advanced Industry 4.0 technology to help its global operations safely navigate the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and continue to service its customers.
Eaton’s Vehicle Group envisions Industry 4.0 as operational and informational technologies, enabling autonomous production systems that are connected, optimized, transparent, proactive and agile.

Mining
German luxury vehicle maker BMW signed a $2.3 billion long-term deal with Swedish battery maker Northvold, the latest of such deals, as European carmakers try to compete with Tesla in the burgeoning electric vehicle market. The Munich-based carmaker signed a five-year cobalt supply deal with Moroccan miner Managem worth some $112M. 

Gear Solutions
Precision Beryllium mirror manufacturer Cambridge Technology explains how the use of best-in-class interferometry hardware and software solutions have streamlined its manufacturing processes and added efficiencies, as well as time and cost-savings, across the company.

Manfuacturing.net
The auto business used to be pretty simple. Crank out vehicles that people want to buy and collect profits. It’s gotten a whole lot more complicated since Mary Barra too over as CEO of General Motors in 2014. She has cut costs and streamlined management, closed factories and sold off money-losing operations in Europe, partly in preparation for the next downtown.

Autoblog
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced an investment program that would allocate $750 million to build charging stations and other electric-vehicle infrastructure as part of the state’s long-term goal to reduce emissions.