Experiential education started to emerge in the 1980s, but it seems like technical education teachers knew this long before all the research was published. Keeping content fresh and finding projects students are interested in is a hurdle that seems to get consistently harder to overcome. Tormach just released its project library to help you do just that.

The world of manufacturing and fabrication is incredibly broad and fast-moving. It gets even faster in the world of custom cars and motorcycles. Scott Phillips works full time at a manufacturing facility with industrial CNC machines, but then he comes home and creates an array of custom parts. He's used his PCNC 1100 to make unique parts, brackets, and harnesses for a local motorcycle company, and he's done some improvising along the way with indexing and various forms of prototyping. With the mill in his garage, he can tackle prototyping projects faster than in the larger industrial shop.

Your G-code program has ended and all looks well with the part. What’s your next move? For most, the next move is to pull the part out of the machine and chuck up another blank to start machining the next part. But, depending on how well debugged your manufacturing process is, and it isn’t very debugged if this is a one-off part you’re making for the first time, you may want to avoid pulling the part out just yet. Why? Because the easiest time to rework the part, assuming it needs any rework, is while it is still in the original setup where the original work was done.

A good vise is a fundamental tool for precision machining. In addition to choosing the right size vise for your machine, identifying the right types of vise for workholding is critical to making sure your workpiece is secured while its being milled. There are a three types of vises that you’ll commonly encounter in CNC milling – the machinist vise, the CNC vise, and the toolmaker vise.

Using a mill requires a lot of dedication to proper measurement and calculation, and to do so means finding the proper tools. Making sure your machine knows where your work is sitting is a vital to quality parts. There are a number of edge-finding and measurement devices, Here are the three most common ones we hear about from Tormach users.

Workholding is a vital piece to any machinist’s arsenal of knowledge. So much so that there is an endless list of books solely dedicated to workholding design – like the two we have available, Jig and Fixture Design Manual and Basic Fixture Design. Some corporations even hire engineers to do nothing but design more efficient ways of keeping work in place.