Firing up your plasma cutting system might be a fitting tribute to the momentous event that happened 40 years ago today. Here's why.

When Neil Armstrong planted the first lunar footprint, the world was watching with an excitement most famously seen in our recently departed Walter Cronkite, who removed his glasses, shook his head, and chuckled in amazement. He could hardly contain his excitement. The country's most trusted newsman was speechless.

That amazement has waned over the decades, as stated in the numerous opinion columns that dot mainstream media today. Back then we had a wide-eyed optimism of what humans could accomplish, and, of course, we had a "bad guy"—the Soviet Union—to beat. After we spent billions and found that astronauts walking on the moon did not make for exciting television, Americans tuned out. While TV science fiction took us at warp speed to a new adventure every week, real space travel seemed slow, laborious, tedious, and expensive. Space travel lost its romance.

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Friday was just one of those days. As usual, I drove my daughter to daycare, parked, carried her in, dropped her off, walked out, and saw the back end of my car smashed, with the hood lid looking a bit like a fortune cookie. Because the vehicle's 11 years old, it didn't take much to declare the thing totaled, so my wife and I spent Memorial Day weekend car shopping.

One GM dealership got me thinking about a fabricator I spoke with last week. Boon Edam, a Dutch maker of revolving doors and turnstiles with a facility in Lillington, N.C., is using a combination plasma/waterjet machine from ESAB to cut various materials, from aluminum and stainless steel to Muntz metal and even a hard plastic used in new packaging. That packaging has helped eliminate what used to be an all too common occurrence: A door would arrive at a construction site, broken. According to Jim Sheehan, manufacturing engineer, this no longer happens thanks to some standardized packaging components cut with the company's combination cutting system.

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I haven't seen "Iron Man," but after reading a news release today, I'm moving the movie to the top of my must-see list. It's beating all others at the box-office, but that's not my main reason for wanting to see it. In fact, I generally stay away from superhero movies.

"Iron Man" stars Robert Downey, Jr., as Tony Stark, a comic book hero who constructs a high-tech suit of armor that allows him to battle evil. What caught my attention in the press release is the machine Stark used to build his suit. Its maker is well-known in the U.S. metal fabricating industry. Can you guess who it is?

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I just got back from an open house event at W.A. Whitney here in Rockford, Ill. I got the opportunity to see a pair of 0.50-inch-thick door components that will be used as part of an armament upgrade for military Humvees.

The metal fabricating shop that had been doing the cutting of the aluminum parts had been using a waterjet for the process, but the equipment couldn't cut fast enough to keep up with the demand for the armament packages. The company now has two Whitney 3400 XP hydraulic punch/plasma cutting combination machines churning out the aluminum parts. The 3400 XPs punch the holes in the parts and then outline them using the Rampage HT2000 plasma systems.

W.A. Whitney officials believe that plasma cutting might make sense for other aluminum-cutting applications, where the speed is a necessity and the end user may want to steer clear of using lasers. Whatever the case, the golden lesson of metal fabricating remains true: There's more than one way to bend, cut, form, or join metal.

Look for an upcoming issue of The FABRICATOR for the aforementioned case study.

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