The need to reduce vehicle weight has spawned myriad new technologies for assembling aluminum, high-strength steel and other materials. These new technologies include self-piercing rivets, flow-drilling screws and friction-stir spot welding.
Overall, 2016 has been a pretty good year for U.S. manufacturing. In every industry covered by ASSEMBLY magazine, manufacturers were investing in people, plants and equipment.
Power tools collect a wealth of data about the fastening process. With some simple statistical analysis, engineers can obtain valuable insight into the fastening process.
Laser welding is one of the newest technologies for joining thermoplastic parts. This noncontact process has many advantages. It’s fast and precise, and it doesn’t generate flash or particulates.
BROUGHTON, UK—Like a cartoon space alien with a dome-like skull, an Airbus Beluga transport plane arriving from Madrid drops from the sky above this village 200 miles northwest of London and taxis to a stop with its front end tucked inside a large building off the runway. Its bulbous forehead pops open to disgorge massive wing panels—98 feet long and 20 feet wide—that will soon be assembled by sophisticated robots and about 800 people into the largest carbon-fiber composite wings now built for commercial aviation.
Quality and innovation have been the name of the game at Club Car ever since the company was founded in 1958. Today, the company produces 40 base models of golf, utility and transportation vehicles.
One way for a manufacturer to enter a new market is through acquisition. However, one downside of the strategy is that the manufacturing assets you acquire do not always mesh perfectly with how you like to do things.
Wire stitching for book binding has been an industry standard since Thomas Briggs invented the wire stitcher in 1896. Over the years, manufacturers began adapting the process to other industrial applications.
Engineers at a major manufacturer of portable electronic devices had a problem. They needed to rivet a small, thin electrical contact to the device’s charger subassembly, but how could they head the tiny rivets—0.02 to 0.03 inch in diameter—without crushing the assembly?