The current industry is increasingly dedicated to a single buyer. This means that a product is created for one person. The original product may have some standard basic functions, but it is still customized for a single customer. This is the result of the overall increase in the development of manufacturing technology and the increase in services.
Take shoes for example. Many people have different shoe sizes on their left and right feet. Consider the fact that modern industry can make shoes that fit your feet. When we talk about the industry, the machining workshop ranks first in customizing machined parts.
They are places where a single customer can process a single part for him. Of course, the price of this service is currently quite high, but with the implementation of new methods, the price is falling. There may be a period of time when each product will be customized for each customer.
What are the ways of product customization?
Customers can obtain customized products in a variety of ways:
- Independent development. For example, the customer already knows the parts he needs, so he can create drawings and 3D models, and then come to the machine shop and order it for manufacturing.
- Coordinated development. When people are not completely clear about the design or its prospects, this is a good way to obtain customized design and machining parts. This puts forward certain requirements for the machinery workshop (such as the design department). The customer interacts with the Department to create custom designs.
- Adaptive customization. This method makes the manufacturer’s work easier, but it imposes many restrictions on customers. This method involves creating a basic component that can be modified according to customer requirements. By using this method, manufacturers can produce a large number of products with a certain degree of customization without wasting too much time on readjusting the manufacturing process.
- Cosmetics customization involves creating a standard product and many different “styles”. For example, different colors. This is the easiest way to create custom parts for mass production, but it only provides rough custom part capabilities.
Requirements of CNC product customization for mechanical workshop
If the goal of the machine shop is to produce a single custom part for the customer, they must adjust the production in some way. First, custom machining involves a small number of different production parts.
This means that manufacturers will have to create a new manufacturing process and create a CNC program for each part from scratch, which makes it easier to provide CNC processing services for new products.
Considering that there are thousands of part types and each part has its own requirements for materials and geometry, shortening the delivery time is the main and most difficult task that manufacturers must solve.
In order to reduce the time required to find materials, manufacturers must provide standard stock for the widest range of materials.
The workshop must also have as many different machine tools as possible. Losing orders simply because you have two lathes and no grinders is a bad strategy. The same can be said about tools and cutters.
The manufacturer must be prepared to produce as many different types of machined parts as possible, including plastic and metal (steel and aluminum) components. In other words, be prepared for anything.
CNC machining of customized parts
Modern small batch production is very different from mass production. With the increasing demand for customized parts, this type of manufacturing is becoming more and more popular. Therefore, a lot of research and development aims to improve the efficiency of the flexible manufacturing system.
CNC machine tools play an important role in the flexibility of part creation. Only 10-15 years ago, in order to manufacture parts with some complex surfaces, a large number of additional manufacturing (i.e. creating patterns for machine tools to follow the required manual labor) had to be carried out. Therefore, most of the complex parts were produced in batch production or manual labor, which was long and expensive. Today, CNC programs replace all these things. In addition, a special computer-aided manufacturing system has been developed, which greatly reduces the time required to create such programs.
The modern tool mechanism allows the manufacturer to install a large number of tools on the lathe, so that the time required to change the tools during the machining process is the shortest.
A series of standardized jigs and jaws have been developed to meet most of the current processing needs. These fixtures are usually composed of many single elements, which can be assembled together on the workbench of the machine tool to fix the parts during the processing stage. Of course, their accuracy is lower than that of special fixtures, but modern measurement systems have eliminated this shortcoming.
Almost all types of modern CNC machine tools can be equipped with a special probe. Then the probe is used to measure the actual size and position of the fixed inventory, and the positioning error is completely eliminated. It can also be used to measure the actual dimensions of parts at some stages of the manufacturing process to ensure that if any errors occur, they can be detected and corrected as soon as possible, so as to minimize the loss of time.
Conclusion
In JTR, we not only support conventional precision machining of parts. In addition to the precise machining method, we can also usually use 3-, 5-axis machining (turning, grinding and milling) to obtain large metal parts with unparalleled precision.
With high-tech CNC cutting and 5-axis machining, you can get a smooth and carefully crafted polishing effect.
