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Did you know?

By using Machine-Ready Blanks, one of our customers shaved 32% off their machining cycle. With 500 parts to machine, they opened up capacity in their shop of 216 hours for more work. An entire month of production time was relieved and they were able to ship 50% more product in the same timeframe. The material cost was higher than they typically expect from sawed stock, but they more than compensated for the cost increase with the savings on machining and the added productivity. They estimated their savings at $5000.

President's Corner

"Decisions... Decisions..."

In the custom precision manufacturing industry, we all are confronted with purchasing decisions on a daily basis. How much should we ask a vendor to do for us? Should we just purchase raw stock? What if we have our supplier provide value-added services? Will it be cost effective? Will the parts show up on time within tolerance? Will it eat into our lead time or improve it?

When it comes to the "make or buy" decision, it's usually easiest to make the same decision we've made in the past.

But as you'll learn in our "Did You Know" feature this month, the easiest decision isn't always the best economic one. Take for instance, the customer who saved $5,000 on a recent job by asking TCI to provide Machine-Ready Blanks for a job going up on his horizontal. Because TCI is specially equipped to provide blanks to net sizes and tolerances in almost any kind of material with double-disc grinding and duplex milling (see below), most customers can save both time and money by making the counter- intuitive decision.

Let one of our inside sales specialists help you out with your next "make or buy" decision. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

We hope you enjoy our motto of the month for October...some things are just hard to argue with.

-John Belzer

This Month's Featured Process - Duplex Milling

Duplex Milling is the most cost effective way to produce high quality square-corner blanks. Duplex Milling provides blanks with squareness and parallelism tolerance to .0002" and reduces pre-machining costs up to 50%. To achieve such a close tolerance, blanks ready for Duplex Milling are clamped in place with two sides exposed for milling. Then, opposing cutters run the length of the material removing equal amounts of material from each side. Pre-machining costs are reduced by milling two sides of the blank simultaneously. This combination of accuracy and speed provides a blank with superior tolerances, squareness, parallelism, and surface finish (up to 16 Ra) at significantly lower costs.