Blog

Helps Reduce Buy-to-Fly Ratios- Buy-to-Fly Ratio (BTF) is a term used mainly by additive manufacturing suppliers to substantiate the efficiencies of 3D printing.  The BTF analogy is a good one, all things equal, but they are not.  There are many different manufacturing methods available today, each with inherent strengths and weaknesses.  One of the tenets […]

Improve working conditions for your employee’s health and safety. Reduce your Company’s footprint on the environment, including energy consumption, process improvement, and material handling. Shorten turnaround time on customer orders. Increase capacity and efficiency to better support customers. Expand capabilities to increase your value to customers. Improve quality by using the latest technology. Here at […]

It seems a lot of folks these days ares caught up in the promise of lights-out machining and manufacturing.  The term alone conjures up images of a dark factory, fully automated and requiring no human presence on-site. Reality is somewhere in between lights-on and lights-out, with the concept being more of a philosophy than a […]

Waterjet Cutting TCI Precision Metals offers precision waterjet cutting services using the lasted precision CAD cut abrasive jet technology available. Our Omax 80X waterjet machine with patented Tilt-A-Jet head provides precision finished edge cuts that are guaranteed to be square. The speed, precision, and flexibility of waterjet cutting make it an excellent choice for cutting […]

Helping our customers do more in less time is what we are all about at TCI Precision Metals, but sometimes even we need to be reminded that without efficiency, busy is not always better.  The old adage of ‘we’ve always done it that way’ no longer applies. Today we need to constantly challenge the status […]

'Those who cannot change their mind cannot change anything' Today, many shops believe the only way to increase throughput is to invest in more capital equipment, and the resources to run it all, which further increases overhead.   Not so fast; shops that consider all possibilities before running out to buy more equipment will often realize […]

To perform repetitive actions until your goal is achieved. Until now, I never considered the fact that we had such a great metaphor for hard work and achieving goals right here in our own shop.  Grinding seems like such a harsh term, but by providing repetitive product quality, and consistency in the way customers, employees, […]

When people think about trepanning they typically envision large, deep, round holes or hollowing of bar stock, but at TCI Precision Metals we provide a variation of trepanning, using plate stock, that we call Shallow Trepanning™. Typical trepanning is the process of drilling a large deep hole in a metal part leaving the core intact. […]

Many of the close tolerance Machine-Ready Blanks we produce at TCI Precision Metals are flat and designed to stay that way.  Demand for flat material that resists movement during machining is high for two reasons, one, part movement can turn parts into scrap, and two, creating flat material, on your shop floor, that resists movement […]

Media Preference Survey Results In December we conducted a survey among our customers to better understand their preferences for gathering information about new products and services.  The results were interesting and some of the data proved to be counter to what you hear in the general media, but we were not surprised.  You see, for […]