ButlerBuilt, a leading manufacturer of motorsports seating located in Harrisburg, N.C., finds a new plasma cutting system to be a much better improvement over the 15-year-old plasma table it dumped in early 2007.

According to OSHA and BLS data, safety in metal manufacturing has been improving. Workplace injuries and injury severity fell from 2000 to 2006. The biggest improvements have been in severe injuries, so minor injuries have gotten more attention lately. One such minor injury is cutting. Roll formers can do their part to prevent workplace cuts by focusing on deburring.

Powder River, a Provo, Utah-based fabricator of farm implements, turned to KNUTH Machine Tools USA for a three-roll bender the company uses to make its round bale feeders for horses.

Nesting for punching must not only consider the part geometry but also the tool boundary. Some nesting software can respect the tool boundary rather than just the part boundary. The software respects the integrity of the punched part, the skeleton, and tooling all at once.

Columnist Gerald Davis guides the reader through the 3-D design of a coupling that needs to be machined. He starts off with a bad example of how to do it and works his way toward a much better process.

Mazworx, a shop that rebuilds engines for racing, fabricates custom parts for racing upgrades, and works on compact cars to prepare them for racing, is also involved in racing. The belief is that it can build up its reputation for racing parts through appearances at NHRA sport compact races throughout the Southeast.

Indianapolis-based Estes Design and Manufacturing has made significant strides in adopting manufacturing-friendly information technology, marrying enterprise resource planning (ERP) and scheduling software to ensure work flows efficiently through the shop.

Diverse customer base—from heavy equipment to medical—key to Blessing Industries' success

The feature looks at what fabricators should be looking for in a CAM system, and how they can improve the efficiency of their machine tools, their work force, and their material utilization.

Costs associated with poor resistance weld quality often can be traced back to faulty electrode usage. With today's high cost of copper—to say nothing of the extra labor and lost production time—wearing out electrodes prematurely has become more expensive than ever.

Changes come often in the steel industry--a business that sticks around long enough might eventually bear little resemblance to the version established at its inception. This is the case for Parkview Metal Products, Lake Zurich, Ill. The company opened in 1950 as a tool and die shop in Chicago, later moving and shifting its focus to automotive, electronic, and grill components. The company believes its culture is changing for the better and plans to continue developing its 5S initiatives, increasing its on-time delivery, and reducing its scrap rate.