Austria – For specialist tool and mould-making company Lercher Werkzeugbau of Klaus, Austria, it was the need for reliability and precision, not short processing times, that determined their choice of machinery processes. For them, grinding has tremendous advantages over EDM and hard milling.

Germany – Standards are expected to play a major role in the success or failure of Industry 4.0. Because the road to digital transformation requires a digital twin of the physical product, the pressure to standardise also includes the product data itself. Cutting tools are no exception to this rule.

Changes to user interaction are said to improve workflow.

At the Automatica show in Munich, the software and equipment manufacturers worked together to show the feasibility of robot machining with the production of a wooden miniature Kuka-robot model at the Fraunhofer IPA booth and a bicycle component at the Robotmaster booth.

Moduleworks announces the release of its 2018.12 CAD/CAM software components. With this latest release, Moduleworks launches its new components for Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). There are also new features for 5-axis, 3-axis and 2-axis machining, machine simulation, the MultiXPost post processor and the NC Editor.

Die-sinking systems from ONA serve for modification and repair of very large moulds and for fine-sparking of high-precision small moulds.

Austria/ UK - Julius Blum, an Austrian manufacturer of top-quality slides, hinges and other products for kitchen units, uses 3-axis and 5-axis machining centres from Roeders to help maintain the company’s international reputation as an innovator and technology leader.

As a precision manufacturer at the high end of its sector, Eropräzisa makes no compromises with its milling tools. This is why, for the last few years, it has decided to commit to using the MMC Hitachi Tool range of tools for 'hard milling' operations, i.e., machining after the heat treatment process.

The term industry 4.0 is hyped especially at trade fairs, but the digital transformation is also met with fear among manufacturers and their professionals: will their expertise become obsolete in the age of digitalisation? Alexander Epple and Michael Königs explain, why the knowledge and experience of experts will still be needed in the future.

When automating machine tools, the focus is usually on loading and unloading workpieces. The increasing spectrum of variants, however, calls for flexible solutions from the building set in order to be able to adapt the automation quickly to the altered tasks.