Germany — Having held all VDWF events as purely digital formats last year, the association's members met again in person for the first time at the 28th Annual General Meeting on 16 September. This time, the VDWF member Fanuc welcomed the approximately 130 participants who travelled to Neuhausen auf den Fildern from all parts of Germany.

The positive geometry of the Double Z inserts for the WSX series takes face milling to a new level of usability with 8 cutting edges. The geometry also produces low cutting resistance, making it ideal for all types of machines, from low power through to heavy duty types. This level of cutting resistance is only usually associated with conventional single sided positive inserts and allows end users to increase machine utilization.

USA — The Plastics Industry Association (Plastics) released its 2021 Size & Impact Report at a webinar attended by Association members, non-members within the industry, and members of the media. The 2021 report indicates that the U.S. plastics industry remains one of the largest sectors of the American economy and continues on a strong growth path.

Germany — “Instead of growth, we must focus on values!” — this slogan from BASF executive Saori Dubourg was taken back home by the participants of the 30th Aachen Machine Tool Colloquium (AWK) on 23 September 2021. More than 1400 specialists and executives from the executive floors of the manufacturing industry had followed the call of the Machine Tool Laboratory WZL of RWTH Aachen University and the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT to the traditional network meeting.

The standard parts specialist Fibro is showing product innovations for toolmaking at Blechexpo in Stuttgart, including the Polystrip stripper unit, the electric transporter for the removal of solid materials such as stamped and waste parts and the second generation of Wireless Pressure Monitoring (WPM), as well as new products from the group of slide gates.

Predictive maintenance describes a forward-looking approach in which machines and systems are maintained proactively and on the basis of permanently collected data.

Yamazaki Mazak has released dates for its specialist ‘Manufacturing Solutions Now’ Open House in June at its European Technology Centre in Worcester.

Orders received by the German machine tool industry in the first quarter of 2019 were 21 per cent down on the same period last year.

Germany — WZL of RWTH Aachen University support companies in identifying proven success factors for the implementation of digital product development.

Germany - Increasing cost pressures and fiercer competition are driving toolmakers to embrace new concepts such as Tooling 4.0 and to industrialise their operations to reduce idle and lead times by limiting the number of variations in tool components and processes.