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If, like me, you remember steam trains, then you might remember that guy who used to walk alongside trains standing at stations and tap the wheels. Wheel tappers I had seen in UK, Irish and German stations, but I don’t know whether the Americas or China had them. Most engineers know that tapping a forged wheel or a cast component can tell you whether it is a good one or not. Read the rest of this entry »

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Cloud computing: what is that? Whatever it is, apparently 41% of IT professionals do not know what this ‘buzzword’ means either. I first heard it at high animated volume from a small elite, neatly suited group of, one presumes, IT professionals taking a break in the pub by Cambridge’s mill pond from a nearby conference. Read the rest of this entry »

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Powered hacksaws, cold circular saws and band saws: at some point in time, most metalworking production engineers will have been involved with them. For me, the first apprentice exercise was to cut a 1in billet (say 25mm) from a 1in (25mm) square section mild steel ‘black bar’ using a powered hacksaw of indeterminable vintage and then told to file the billet into a nice, shiny 1in cube +/-0.001in (25mm within +/-0.03mm). After the first three months in the training school at the lately demolished Bankfield Works of GKN Sankey in Bilston, West Midlands, a gap of 0.001in looked enormous! Read the rest of this entry »

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I have to confess that when I visited the UK’s Subcon subcontracting show at the National Exhibition Centre near Birmingham last week, I had fully expected to see a sea of downcast subcontractor’s faces and sparsely populated aisles between the booths. No, not a bit of it! The show looked busy and everyone of the 14 or so subcontractors one spoke to seemed almost optimistic. Read the rest of this entry »

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The topic in last week’s newsletter was lack of national foresight when considering the future of manufacturing plants under recession conditions. Read the rest of this entry »

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How is IT (information technology) progressing in your company? If your company is a ’small-to-medium enterprise’ (SME), the chances are that either the company already has a satisfactory system on board, that there are in use one or two ‘modules’ from an ‘off-the-shelf’ suite of software, say in invoice management and production control, or that the management is still thinking about it. Read the rest of this entry »

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Are you going to the EMO International Machine Tool Exhibition in Milan, Italy, this year? I always found that Milan, or Milano, is a city that ‘grows’ on you. My first visit in 1971 gave, I am sorry to say, the impression one would get in any European industrial city, but repeat visits and establishment of friends and colleagues, opened up the very interesting, older parts of the city, including Roman gateways and temples, let alone the fine medieval churches and a grand castle. Read the rest of this entry »

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German and Swiss grinding machines, be they universal reciprocal, prismatic or cylindrical surface grinders, have always been known for precision and quality. They remain so, but demand for ‘universal’ machines, as engineers said in Switzerland last week, has been steadily dropping, and more so, in the recent ‘credit crunch’. Read the rest of this entry »

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Electric motors, I guess, we all used to take for granted, be they working conveyors, operating pallet systems, driving cooling pumps, powering machine tools or simply operating the exhaust and cooling fans. Read the rest of this entry »

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Well, two topics in the UK government’s recent financial budget announcement ought to be of some interest to manufacturing. One is automotive ’scrappage’. The other is the doubling of capital allowances. Read the rest of this entry »