The Allure of Aluminum

Article from: Cutting Tool Engineering, 7/14/2020 by Alan Richter

When a workpiece material is relatively easy to machine and a wide range of parts are made of it, a large number of part manufacturers will machine it. As a result, shops must achieve a high level of productivity to remain competitive, and that’s certainly the case with aluminum alloys.

“For the customer, it’s all about how many cubic inches of material they remove per minute,” said Mike MacArthur, vice president of engineering for RobbJack Corp., Lincoln, California. “The more chips they get out as fast as possible, the more money they are going to make.”

“We even have a customer that is cutting so much aluminum that they have cut holes in a wall of the machine,” MacArthur said, adding that the wall was replaced but not the machine. “It sounds like a machine gun going off when they’re cutting aluminum.”

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