The recent Hardinge Machine Technology Show (HMTS) 2014 was the company's largest machine technology show to date. On display were Hardinge turning centers, Bridgeport machining centers, grinders from the Hardinge Grinding Group and workholding products. Live cutting demonstrations took place throughout the two-day event and seminars were held each day. "We have products here from Switzerland, England, Taiwan and some from Germany as well," said Rick Simons, President and CEO, Hardinge Group. "We are able to show the extensive capabilities of Hardinge here in one place. It is an exciting event for our customers and for us." Hardinge has a 125 year history. From its beginnings as a lathe manufacturer, it has added milling machines (Bridgeport), grinding machines (Kellenberger, Hauser, Tschudin, Jones & Shipman and Usach) and workholding products (Forkardt). With all of its products, Hardinge focuses on precision. "SUPER-PRECISION ® is what Hardinge is about," said Simons. "It is measuring things with millionths of an inch accuracies. It is what we are known for, it is what our history has been and it is very important that we continue to push the envelope. Our machines are capable of maintaining those tolerances day in and day out with very little operator intervention." Grinding The Group's grinding brands encompass a broad spectrum of cylindrical, universal, O.D./I.D. grinding machines. The product portfolio covers a wide range of part sizes, from very small precision parts to parts up to 200" in length, 46-1/2" in diameter and weighing up to 4,000 lbs. The Hardinge Grinding Group's marketing, sales, service and support are under one management structure and overseen by Daniel Rey, Director of Sales, North America, and headquartered at the Grinding Center of Excellence in Elgin, IL. The center features: • Application engineering support, process qualification and machine runoff services • Development of turnkey systems • Design and integration of automation systems • Development and assembly of Usach universal and production I.D. and O.D. cylindrical precision grinding machines • Re-controlling of CNC cylindrical grinding machines • Sales, service and repair part support. "Our Service/Spare Parts Team will handle anything related to customer service, support and spare parts for all the product lines," said Rey. "People are being cross-trained while still maintaining brand-specific expertise so we can support our customers who are using all of these products that are now under this one umbrella. The service engineers we employ are spread throughout the nation in different locations. We strategically place service engineers to be closer to the customers." Workholding Hardinge provides over 15 product categories for workholding, including collets, chucks, quick change, step chucks, collet blocks, custom applications and more. (l-r) Chris Brown, Business Unit Manager; Brian Braden, Direct Sales Engineer; Bob Holtz, Regional Sales Manager. Forkardt's latest product is a chuck with a composite core (cutaway model shown). This enables the chuck to get up to speed and stop more quickly for increased production. It also means less weight on the spindle, providing better machine harmonics and enhanced surface finishes. Monitoring Machine Utilization An educational seminar presented by Will Sobel, CEO, System Insights, Inc., and Joel Neidig, Technology Manager, Indiana Technology & Manufacturing Companies (ITAMCO), showed how MTConnect can be utilized in tracking operational performance throughout a company. The primary goal of MTConnect, according to Sobel, was in identifying what was needed to move the industry forward. Data was the key. "All of the industry goals were based upon the idea of getting data from all of the manufacturing processes, all the way from ERP down to the shop floor," said Sobel. "Visibility is also important. This includes seeing what is happening in the shop 24/7 from any location. With data one can predict failure, quality issues or other problems that occur in the manufacturing processes—things one should be aware of before they become critical." Each device on the shop floor speaks a different language, with some devices also using and encoding information differently. MTConnect provides a common language for all of the manufacturing equipment. MTConnect is also significant in that there is no cost associated in implementing the standard. It is open source technology. One of the advantages of a standard is in applications. Applications typically require a variety of machines and multiple types of data combinations. These have to be redone each time another application is opened. "With the standard, each data source supplies data using the standard and each application implements the standard once," said Sobel. "Think of a data source as a machine tool, for example. Machine tools come with MTConnect already on them. Basically, as an application factor, I can just start collecting data immediately. I do not have to do anything. The data is already available. This allows the industry to have a lot more applications—a lot more choice and a lot more innovation." Another interesting feature of MTConnect is it is read-only. This provides simplicity and also allows for analytics as well as device integration. It also provides a large measure of security. Machine language is basically the words and semantics used to be able to describe the data. With MTConnect, every word as a single meaning. That makes it easy for the application to get the data and understand immediately what is going on. It is contextualized, so applications know the meaning and how to interpret the information. Even though MTConnect is read-only, it can be used for automation. "The idea is that both devices are watching each other and they share information about what they want to do," said Sobel. "If you look at a standard device integration project, you have cell control with custom interface, PLCs and DIOs, and then you have your machine tool and robot connected— there are a lot of pieces at play in that integration. "The MTConnect solution was very simple. We basically just have the robot controller and CNC controller— a small application running on each side. The applications just connect to MTConnect agents on either side, watching each other. The intelligence was put onto the different machines. What it meant was a lot less money. We were able to do this with one very low cost PC. The rest of the software was running on the controller. Since you are not dealing with a bundle of wires and binary data — you are dealing with rich, semantic data—you can change the part. You can tell it what the part ID was and that part ID would be communicated from the robot to the machine tool. The machine would then switch part programs and change the configuration on the fly. It could also find out what type of part it is, know how to fixture it, etc., based on the fact that we were communicating information from the machine tools that were talking together and passing information back and forth. We were not dealing with individual movements of the robot. We were dealing with a higher level of communication, which was basically load material, unload material, etc. There is no reason why this cannot scale also to support multiple devices and add multiple machine tools talking to multiple robots." Utilizing the Standard ITAMCO is a job shop that manufacturers everything from large gears to small components across a variety of industries. A large combination of different machine tools are needed to produce these products. The company uses MTConnect to monitor all of the machines in its two facilities. All machines and departments are connected with MTConnect. One of the systems Joel Neidig and his team uses to monitor the shop floor is ShopViz, a cloud based application that enables 24/7 machine tool monitoring in real time. It is designed to enable users to target available capacity, avoid delays and detect issues. Since MTConnect is not application or software dependent, other software can be used as well. Neidig noted that a new machine tool is not required for a shop to begin utilizing MTConnect. Different adaptors are available that will allow connection to existing equipment. Neidig and his team plan to update their system to include part tracking. They have already expanded the system to include other items such as part count, part completion, work orders and more. Turning and Milling Left: (l-r) Thomas Sheehy, Manager, Applications Engineering; Neil Moxy, Manager, International Technical Sales; James Langa, President, Turning and Milling Group. TheT Series is Hardinge's highest accuracy slant bed lathe. It is designed for 2-axis high precision machining for complex multi-tasking operations requiring a high level of precision. right: Machined on theT Series, this demo component features the following: • 1.00" sphere: profile tolerance +/- .000060" • 200" ARC (.00015" chord height): profile tolerance +/- .000030" • 3 small steps (.000050" depth): tolerance +/- .000010" • 1.500" cylinder (straightness and roundness): cylindricity .000040" Part information: • 8620 steel 60-62 Rc • Surface finish < 8 micro-inch • Leitz Reference Xi CMM (measurement verification) (l-r) Bart Ehlers, Distribution Manager, GibbsCAM, and Bob Allington, Application Engineer, Hardinge Group. This steel spool part typically has seals and other features related to the hydraulics industry. It was created using GibbsCAM and machined on the SUPERPRECISION ® T51. James Langa, President, Turning & Milling Group, with the GX 480 APC with automatic rotary pallet changer. This mill offers high productivity with machine cutting during workpiece change. XYZ travels are 18.90" x 15.75" x 16.93" (480 mm x 400 mm x 430 mm). For more information contact: Hardinge Inc. P.O. Box 1507 Elmira, NY 14902-1507 800-843-8801 info@hardinge.com www.hardinge.com www.shophardinge.com