WITH MANY PROCESSES THAT RELY ON MANUAL OPERATIONS NO LONGER POSSIBLE IN COVID-SAFE ENVIRONMENT, MANUFACTURERS WILL NEED TO AUTOMATE. Whether driven by the reduction of in-shop personnel due to layoffs or to maintain social distancing guidelines into the future, many machine shops will likely be reevaluating ways to eliminate labour-intensive manual operations if they can be automated instead. At the top of this list are secondary finishing operations that are conducted offline to remove excess material on parts fabrication. Today, much of this work is still performed by hand using oscillating tools, grinders, files, abrasive hand pads and wire brushes. Fortunately, secondary operations such as honing and polishing can be accomplished using a variety of abrasive tools mounted in CNC machine toolholder and carousel without taking the part offline. The better news is that in addition to reducing in-shop labor requirements, completing surface finishing simultaneously in the same operation as machining also speeds production of high-volume parts. "When the economy begins to recover in the coming months, machine shops are going to be driven to continue to find way to increase efficiency and one way is through automating offline processes," says Tim Urano, quality manager at Wolfram Manufacturing, a company that machines metal parts with complex geometries on 4 and 5-axis machines. "So, any time we can incorporate secondary operations right into the machining process, we save time, money, and also reduce our in-house labour requirements."
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