Did you know?
TCI Precision Metals is an Alcoa, Kaiser and Hulamin distributor. This gives TCI the ablility to provide the best possible pricing on material. Not only that, but having nearly 500,000 lbs. of 6061, 2024, and 7075 plate and sheet on our floor (just to name a few) gives us the ability to provide quick turn-around for your hot jobs.
| For a sampling of the materials we process, please visit our Materials page. |
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President's Corner
"Time to Make Some Noise"
Once upon a time, mid-term elections referred to those that were held midway between the 4-year -cycle of presidential elections. Maybe it's just me, but now that it's November and there are at least three critical statewide elections being held across the country, I can't help but feel that it's not too early to be actively engaged, on behalf of manufacturing, in the next election cycle.
I don't know about you, but here in California we constantly battle a state legislature that is, at best, indifferent to manufacturing. At worst, it has enthusiastically encouraged businesses, especially those in manufacturing, to leave the state for over two decades. But it's where we and our employees choose to live and raise our families, doing our best to provide meaningful work, good benefits and career opportunities.
It has long been the case that in our manufacturing world, regardless of title or status within our companies, we tend to be far too busy making a living to get actively involved by lobbying and attending meetings, near and far. The good news is that you don't have to leave your desks to do so.
There are a number of ways to contact senators, congressmen and state representatives. I'll only list a short few:
www.congress.org - By entering your zip code in the box in the middle of the landing page, you'll have access to all of your national and state legislators.
Write Your Representative - This gives you direct access to your congressperson.
US Senate - This gives you direct access to your senators.
Making the process even easier, the NTMA (National Tooling & Machining Association) and the PMA (Precision Metalforming Association) have combined efforts to represent small custom precision manufacturing on the national level. By becoming a member - and there are so many reasons, on so many levels to be a member of either or both - you get more than the access listed above. NTMA and PMA already have staked out positions vitally important to manufacturing and have written the letters for you. You can edit if you want. Or just click "send". Either way, it doesn't get any easier to make your voice heard.
We are constantly told that our legislators at all levels actually pay attention to what their constituents say. Today that is easily done through webmail. Let's all be advocates for manufacturing and encourage them to support legislation that works for precision custom manufacturing.
-John Belzer
This Month's Featured Process - Double-Disc Grinding
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Double-Disc Grinding is a highly efficient grinding method that reduces premachining costs up to 50% and provides dimensional tolerances, parallelism, and flatness to ±.0002". Double-Disc Grinding uses two opposing abrasive wheels to simultaneously grind two sides of a blank. In one operation, equal amounts of material are removed from both sides. |
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