Niche little American manufacturing story.
Most turbine blades and vanes start as a round bar of superalloy. These are cast in steel tubes, then pressed out as ~45” ingots ranging from 2-7” in diameter.
Every investment casting mold needs a precise charge weight, and the typical industry tolerance is +3/-0 lbs. We built a fully automated abrasive saw that cuts these ingots to +0.25/-0 lbs.
It scans the bar on the infeed and adjusts cut length on the fly to hit the requested weight. Auto loading, full dust containment, outfeed weighing, and marking with weight, heat number, or whatever traceability the foundry wants.
Gas turbines, jet engines, and rockets all run on cast superalloy parts. The grid buildout and the defense ramp both come back to foundries cutting a staggering amount of superalloys. We build these machines in Warren, Ohio for the foundries doing that work, and we think the equipment behind American hard tech should be American too.
@SkinnyfatTony I learned how to wire controls the same way. We had our electrician quit mid job so I jumped from marketing to wiring and learned on the fly. Ended up doing it and marketing for a year before we refilled the role. Probably my favorite working year.
My poor GoPro. We’re torture testing a new abrasive wheel on one of our investment casting charge cutting systems(@SaferCut ). I need marketing content so the brave GoPro goes in the soup.
@zanehengsperger And then they tell you a date as a maybeeee….. then it gets pushed around for 2 weeks because they “can’t get the truck, truck cancelled, they sold their big forklift” or some other ridiculous excuse
@CalebChamberla6 We just went through a phase of this. Got more machine orders than ever all at once for 24 months. Now it’s somewhat slow and it feels so strange to have time to improve/fix every thing and system that broke when we were running.