Chapter 8
Accessorizing for Success
IN THIS CHAPTER
Palletizing parts
Taking indexers for a spin
Bar feeding your lathe
Becoming best friends forever with a robot
Taking it offline with presetters
Keeping cool under pressure
To do a common thing uncommonly well brings success.
—HENRY J. HEINZ
Good machines and good tooling are … well, good, but finding ways to make them more productive is not just good, it’s great. The first step down this road is the use of sound machining practices, but this can only bring you so far. No matter how well organized the shop and how skilled the machinists, many shops still take hours to set up a job. Stopping the machine every few minutes to load parts is a huge time suck, but remains a widely accepted practice. And wouldn’t it be nice if you could turn off the lights at five o’clock and come back the next day to a pile of completed parts? But how ...