Machine Tools

INDUSTRIAL CODES

NAICS: 33-3512 Machine Tool (Metal Cutting Types) Manufacturing, 33-3513 Machine Tool (Metal Forming Types) Manufacturing, 33-3514 Special Dies, Tools, Jigs, and Fixtures, 33-3515 Cutting Tool and Manufacturing Tool Accessory Manufacturing

SIC: 3541 Machine Tools, Metal Cutting Types, 3542 Machine Tools, Metal Forming Types, 3543 Industrial Patterns, 3544 Special Dies, Tools, Jigs and Fixtures

NAICS-Based Product Codes: 33-35121 to 33-35129, 33-3512A, 33-35124W, 33-3513, 33-35131, 33-35133, 33-35135, 33-35137, 33-3513W, 33-35140, 33-35151, 33-35153, 33-3515W

PRODUCT OVERVIEW

Machine tools play the same central role in metalworking that computers play in data processing. They shape and process metals into components. Manufacturers then assemble these components into durable goods and also use parts in many other products. At the foundation of industrial activity are the extraction industries by means of which we obtain our fuels and our ores. We refine the fuels and smelt the ores. The primary metal industry produces basic shapes—bars, billets, ingots, sheets, tubes, rails, bars, wires, and some fifty other recognized intermediate or final products. The first three differ only in their widths. Foundries remelt such shapes to make castings; hot metal is poured into dies. Other products of primary mills are ready to use immediately. Wire products, reinforcing bars, and steel beams used in construction are examples. A substantial portion of primary output, however, moves on to fabrication plants in semi-finished forms. There, battalions of machine tools await to transform them into final components.

The terminology commonly used in the industry may cause confusion. A machine tool should not be confused with a cutting tool. While the machine tool is a large structure, the cutting tool is a relatively small device attached to the machine's working arm. By analogy to hand tools, the electric drill is the machine tool, the drill bit is the cutting tool. Cutting tools may be changed to do different kinds of work and are replaced as they wear out. Indeed, the market for cutting tools is much larger than the market for machine tools, and each kind of product is produced by its own industry. Machine tools also come in two basic types: cutting machines remove metal and forming machines shape it. The object on which a machine tool operates is known as the workpiece; it is the metal that is being shaped or modified.

Cutting Machines

Cutting machines shape metal by separating pieces of it using saws or removing metal selectively from the surface or the body of a workpiece. The machine itself holds and moves the piece and directs the cutting tool. The tool itself may be a saw, drill bit, broach, milling cutter, reamer, tool bit, or another specialized device. Broaches are tapered, serrated, hole-making tools. Milling cutters are further differentiated below. Tool bits are used in lathes. Grinding and buffing machines may use abrasive wheels instead of cutting tools. In many applications, the tool is stationary while the workpiece is in motion. In others, for instance when drilling multiple holes into a block or broaching several openings on a single piece, the block may be held still while the drills descend to do their work. On a lathe the workpiece rotates. In drilling, boring, and milling, the cutting tool itself is rotating and the workpiece may be held still or may be moved horizontally. The cutting edge used in all applications must be made of a material harder than the workpiece. Three other fundamental requirements are: appropriate motion to achieve the desired cut, heat control provided by cutting fluids, and guidance systems to ensure precision. In complex modern machines, guidance is achieved by electronic systems that communicate with servomotors—a servomotor being an electromechanical device that uses electrical inputs to direct the position of the armature of a motor.

Forming Machines

Forming machines shape metal by using dies or by bending, drawing, and shearing the workpiece. In a typical die-based approach, the operator brings the workpiece to a high temperature. While it is red-hot and glowing, it is hammered into shape between simple dies while confined in place or manipulated mechanically. The hammer is lifted hydraulically and is powered by weight or assisted by fluid power. Alternatively the die may be in two pieces that approach the red-hot metal and sandwich it between the die pieces. High pressure exerted by the machine causes the two halves of the die to close. Explosive metal forming, also called high energy rate forming, or HERF, uses controlled explosions instead of hammers to move the metal into the die. The explosive force is exerted through a medium like water, oil, or air. The strength and design of the dies used in forming machines is crucial. Dies must withstand the impacts or pressures applied. They must also be shaped in such a way that the metal from the hot blank reaches the deepest and least accessible parts of the die. The product of these machines is called a forging. Some forgings, depending on shape, may require additional machining in a cutting machine to finish them. Other types of forming machines shape metal by punching, bending, and shearing. Such machines are referred to as presses; hammer-and-die machines are forges.

Evolution

Forming machines represent the automation and extension of the traditional smithy. The smith usually shapes hot metal by hammering it on an anvil. The anvil—with one or two rounded and tapered horns, a narrow step at one or both ends enabling the smith to create angles, a wide face for general use, and two holes (the smaller pritchel and the larger hardy hole) used for additional implements or as aids in bending metal—represents an all-purpose die. In forming machines, human judgment necessary to know when to stop, how hard to hammer, when to reheat the workpiece, and so on are translated for each object into appropriate die design and settings on the machine, which guide the force, timing, and duration of the impacts.

Historians of technology trace cutting machines back to the hunting bow and to the potter's wheel. Early humans used bow-string wrapped around a stick to make fire. Holding the stick straight they caused it to rotate rapidly by moving the bow back and forth. The tight string caused the stick to whirl on a piece of soft, dry wood until the latter heated, began to smoke, and threw sparks that the fire-maker could ignite by blowing. It is believed that in this same way people also discovered how to drill holes. The potter's wheel was the first invention to cause a workpiece to rotate while the hands, working on the clay, served to shape it and to remove excess material. The earliest machine tool was the lathe, essentially a potter's wheel turned ninety degrees to one side. Instead of turning clay, the early lathe turned a piece of wood. A blade applied to the wood could uniformly carve it with little effort and pleasing precision.

The Cutting Edge

The cutting tool must be harder than the workpiece upon which it is designed to work. The machining of metals improved as advances in metallurgy delivered harder types of steel. Ultimately the discovery of tungsten and of tungsten carbide produced the means of cutting the hardest steel. Nature gives us iron in oxidized form mixed with minerals. To get the iron out we must remove the oxygen. We do this by burning coke mixed with ore. The iron in the ore melts. Carbon combines with oxygen and removes it from the iron. In this process, however, a fair amount of carbon remains in the resulting pig iron, typically 3.5 percent. Carbon at these levels makes pig iron strong but brittle. In steel-making most of the carbon is removed. To make the strongest steels, however, some of the carbon in the metal is left but rearranged by various processes such as tempering. Steel is tempered by cooling and reheating it in sequence. Tempering causes carbon to align itself uniformly within the crystalline lattice of steel. Ultra-high carbon steel will have a carbon content of 1 to 2 percent; it is extremely hard but also difficult to weld.

Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, a Swedish chemist and mineralogist, discovered tungsten in 1758. The word itself is a form of the Swedish terms for heavy and for stone. Tungsten is a metal and present in nearly every home as the filament of incandescent bulbs, but more than half of all tungsten mined is used in cutting tools. By 1855 tungsten had been introduced as a hardening agent for steel. By 1926 it had been developed into cutting tools as tungsten carbide, the hardest material available to all those who cannot afford to use diamonds. The hardest cutting tools are tipped with industrial diamonds.

NC/CNC Controls

Automatic methods of controlling machine tools emerged from the pioneering efforts of John T. Parsons in 1949 in work conducted by Parsons Corporation for the U.S. Air Force. Parsons, working with Frank L. Stulen, one of his employees, developed the complex mathematical descriptions of tool movements in three dimensions (X,Y,Z) with the aid of early IBM calculators. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) participated in this work and eventually developed servomotors that became standard in so-called numerically controlled (NC) machine tools. NC devices came of age in the mid-1960s when computer-generated machine instructions began to replace operator skills. The instructions were held in the form of punched paper ribbons that could be read by the machine tool to guide its servomechanisms. Operators needed only to change the workpiece and to activate the NC tool. After electronic circuitry directly talking to the servomotors replaced punched paper, automatic cutting came to be called CNC, for computerized NC, although the shorter abbreviation persists, as for instance in the reporting of the U.S. Bureau of the Census. In the twenty-first century, NC machining and CNC machining have essentially the same meaning: software is guiding the cut.

Functional Classifications

Cutting machines come in five major functional categories. The industry produces milling, drilling and boring, turning, gear cutting, and grinding and polishing machines:

• Mills utilize a cutter with multiple teeth that eat away material. The three basic cutters used are called slab, face, and end mills. A slab cutter is shaped like the tire on a car and moves over the workpiece surface like a wheel; the spindle of the cutter is parallel to the workpiece surface. If the blades cut on the downward motion the method is called down-milling; if the cut is from the bottom of the workpiece upward, the method is called up-milling. Face cutters have relatively wide surfaces and sit on top of the workpiece like a cup on a table, with the bottom of the cup carrying the blades. The spindle of the cutter is perpendicular to the workpiece. An end cutter is shaped like a drill bit. It is a rod pointing down at the surface to be milled. End mills are typically used to produce indentations in the workpiece. The sides of the indentation may be tapered because end mills can be tilted to selected angles. Variations on such tools can produce all manner of shapes including slits, slots, and shaped forms on the workpiece surface. Milling is the most widely used cutting technique, although most milling machines are multi-functional devices. Approximately 40 percent of machine tools are mills or have milling functions alongside others.
• Drilling and boring machines make holes in the workpiece. Drills rotate as they penetrate the piece. Boring heads are used to enlarge a hole. As the drill bit penetrates, the material it is removing leaves the opening in the free space between the spiraling cutting blades of the bit. Freestanding drilling and boring machines are 10 percent of the cutting tool category.
• Turning machines, or lathes, represent 16 percent of the machine tools made. In these devices the workpiece itself is rotated as cutting blades touch it and remove material. The blades can be moved from point to point along the rotating workpiece; multiple blades may be used at the same time. The method is well suited for the machining of cylindrical surfaces.
• Gear cutting is a specialized type of milling known as hobbing. As the workpiece, the future gear, is turned, the cutting bit turns at the same speed, its multiple blades removing metal from the gear forming one tooth at a time. Gear cutting machines represent 7 percent of the market.
• Grinding and polishing machines differ from other forms of cutting because they use wheels of abrasive materials to give workpieces their intermediate and final finish. Grinding, polishing, buffing, honing, and lapping are specific functional activities. Honing uses abrasive rods to smooth surfaces including borehole interiors. Lapping is a fine-finishing step using very fine abrasives. Grinding and polishing is a large category and accounts for 28 percent of all machine tools in the cutting machine sector.

Metal forming machines divide into two basic types: forges and presses. Forging of metals can be hot or cold and may involve repeated hammering of the piece using flat dies in order to achieve a desired dimension or die-stamping. In the latter operation metal is forced into dies. Most forging processes are hot and operate at temperatures of 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Three general methods are in use:

• Impression die forging compresses metal between two halves of a die. Variants involve pressing metal into a die relatively slowly at uniform pressure to ensure that all hollows are filled.
• Open die forging, which is equivalent to hammering the piece until it is shaped correctly, uses flat dies without internal profiles—protrusions or cavities—of any kind. The workpiece may be held and moved between blows of the hammer by a mechanical manipulator executing pre-programmed rotations and advances of the piece or the process may involve successive steps in which different flat dies are applied to the piece.
• Cold forging, which may take place at room temperature or in the presence of several hundreds of degrees of heat, is used with softer metals. As the Forging Industry Association describes the general method, "cold forging encompasses many processes [including] bending, cold drawing, cold heading, coining, extrusion, punching, thread rolling and more to yield a diverse range of part shapes." Cold drawing pulls the metal and cold heading increases the cross-sectional area of a workpiece, thus making it wider, longer, or both.

Metal presses typically operate on cold metals and on sheet or plate metals. They form their workpieces by punching, shearing, and bending the metal into various shapes.

Metal forming machinery represented 24 percent of all machine tools in use in the United States in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Within that category itself, forges of all types were 30 percent and metal presses 70 percent of the market.

MARKET

In 1997 domestic producers of machine tools shipped product valued at $6.9 billion; in 2005 shipments were $4.6 billion. Within this category cutting machines declined from $4.7 billion to $3.3 billion and forming machines from $2.2 billion to $1.3 billion in the 1997 to 2005 period. If cutting tools as well as dies, fixtures, and jigs used by the machines are included, the market is larger but trends do not change. Cutting tools had shipments of $5 billion in 1997 and $4.5 billion in 2005; special dies and fixtures declined from a level of $8.8 billion to $8.4 billion in this period. All growth rates were negative. Machine shipments declined at the rate of 5.1 percent, 4.5% in cutting machines and 6.4% in forming machines. Cutting tools declined at 1.3 percent and special dies and fixtures at 0.5 percent yearly. Declines in the more recent 2000 to 2005 period were uniformly steeper reflecting the brief 2001–2002 recession from which recovery in 2005 had not yet returned sales to levels experienced in 2000. The general picture is presented in Figure 128.

Data on imports and exports of these industries were available for the 2000 to 2005 period only and provide a means of calculating apparent consumption in the United States. Apparent consumption is calculated by starting with domestic production, reducing it by the level of exports, and adding the level of imports. In the period under consideration, apparent consumption exceeded domestic production uniformly and across the board—the consequence of imports exceeding exports in every year. Apparent consumption, however, declining from $22.7 billion in 2000 to $20 billion in 2005, also exhibited negative growth of 2.5 percent per year. Total exports declined at the rate of 0.6 percent, total imports at the rate of 0.1 percent. Figure 129 presents these data.

The Machine versus Its High Priced Parts

In 2005, with apparent consumption valued at $19.98 billion, machine tools represented $6.3 billion, or 32 percent, of this total, and parts (tooling, dies, and fixtures) $13.7 billion. For every $1 buyers spent on machine tools they spent $2.18 on the parts and devices to use in these machines. The machine tool is bought once and used for a long time. The market for parts or changeable tooling that are used with the machine tool are a far larger market than is the market for machine tools themselves. Machine tool parts wear out and must be replaced at frequent intervals. Users of these devices can more readily delay upgrading machines than replacing tools so that, in consequence, sales of cutting tools, dies, and accessories have been declining at much lower rates than sales of machine tools.

The Global Picture

The U.S. manufacturing industry was the top consumer of machine tools in the period from 1993 to 2002—and in most earlier decades as well throughout the twentieth century. U.S. consumption dipped in 2003 and has been heading down so much so that in 2007 (using preliminary estimates), the United States was the third-largest consumer in the world. China had emerged as the top purchaser of machine tools, followed by Japan in second place, and the United States in third.

In 1981 the United States was the top producer of machine tools in the world. It had also had the lead across the globe in earlier decades, competing for top rank with Germany which out-performed the United States in some years. The U.S. industry began declining after 1981. By 1992 the country had fallen to fourth place behind Japan, Germany, and Italy. By 2003 the U.S. industry ranked fifth, with China out-producing the United States and in fourth place. By 2006 U.S. producers had dropped to seventh place. In that year the major producing countries were Japan, Germany, China, Italy, South Korea, Taiwan, and then the United States. Switzerland, not usually ranked among giants in heavy industry, was ranked eighth in 2006, just behind the United States with shipments equivalent to 78 percent of U.S. production.

The general decline both in the use and production of machine tools is a reflection of the decline of manufacturing as part of the U.S. economy. Using data from the World Resources Institute, based on compilations of the World Bank, in 1996 manufacturing was 18.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the United States, 22.2 percent in Germany, 23.3 percent in Japan, and 33.5 percent in China. The GDP to manufacturing relationship in 2004, eight years later, showed decline of this sector in three of the four cases cited. The U.S. manufacturing share of GDP had dropped to 14.2 percent, Germany's had increased to 22.7 percent, Japan's had dropped to 21 percent, and China's to 32.4 percent. The largest loss in manufacturing was that of the United States.

Other factors producing negative growth appear to involve rising technological competition and slow or inadequate response to global challenges by the domestic industry. In a 1994 study prepared for the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, a part of the White House, Rand Corporation gave six reasons for the decline of the U.S. industry as follows:

• Insufficient number of large firms and little cooperation among small companies. Global competition requires large companies able to invest in technology and export marketing. A national mechanism to stimulate foreign trade, drawing smaller companies into it, must also be present.
• Difficulty obtaining capital for investment. In the 1990s investors viewed the U.S. industry as too small and not profitable enough to invest in. Although not stated by Rand, investment capital was flowing into hotter markets like computers and Internet start-ups.
• Inadequate supply of skills and disincentives to invest in training. Rand found that the skills of the U.S. labor force were inferior to those of the industry's competitors elsewhere. U.S. producers used CNC machines to replace skilled with less skilled operators whereas Japanese firms used CNC machines to train machinists. U.S. companies also abandoned expensive apprentice training programs to avoid training machinists for other companies that avoided training costs.
• Poor performance in translating technological research into marketing advantage. Links between universities and industry were weak, according to Rand, and government research was focused on very sophisticated devices with few widely-marketable applications.
• Unsophisticated domestic demand, thus slow acceptance by domestic users of advanced technology. Manufacturers in the United States were not investing in innovation but making do with older tools.
• Weak export capacity and export infrastructure.

Developments in the market since the mid-1990s have not removed these barriers. Foreign companies, however, intending to exploit the U.S. market more effectively, have been drawn to acquire U.S. producers, simultaneously gaining access to the domestic market and adding to their overall capacity.

KEY PRODUCERS/MANUFACTURERS

Companies participate in this industry by specializing in one of its chief technological sectors rather than producing all systems and tools that make machining and metal forming possible. The three sectors are: machine tools; electronic control systems providing the CNC guidance; and cutting edges (tooling narrowly viewed), a sector that depends on metallurgical know-how.

MAG Industrial Automation Systems

MAG Industrial, headquartered in Sterling Heights, Michigan, is the largest machine tool company in the United States, and is the principal enterprise in the holdings of Maxcor, Inc., a privately-held investment company. In 1981, the peak year in U.S. machine tool history, the top five companies were Cincinnati Milacron, Bendix, Cross & Trecker, Giddings & Lewis, Ex-Cell-O, and F. Joseph Lamb. These leaders held 40 percent of the market that year. MAG Industrial unifies elements of all of these companies except Bendix. MAG Industrial's portfolio also includes foreign acquisitions. Maxcor, headquartered in New York, New York reported that MAG Industrial had sales of $1.2 million in 2006 and was the fifth largest machine tool company in the world. Although MAG Industrial is a single segment under Maxcor and its largest holding, it consists of eleven different corporate units operating in the United States, Germany, Korea, Brazil, France, and the United Kingdom. As a private investment company Maxcor does not file reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); hence, its general corporate strategy, and the degree of coordination of its holdings, is difficult to discern.

Yamazaki Mazak

The world's largest machine tool builder is the Japanese company, Yamazaki, operating worldwide and, in the United States, as Mazak Corporation based in Florence, Kentucky. Yamazaki has made significant investments in the United States. Yamazaki's reported sales in machine tools was $1.58 billion in 2005.

Smaller U.S. participants include Hardinge Inc., of Elmira, New York and the Bridgeport brands, a company it acquired. Hardinge had sales in 2006 of $326 million. Ingersoll Machine Tools Inc., owned by Camozzi Group of Italy, had sales of approximately $62 million in the middle years of the first decade of the 2000s. Ingersoll was one of the top 15 companies in 1981. Camozzi reported sales in 2004 of €110 million ($145 million). Textron describes itself as a multi-industry corporation, a conglomerate with sales revenues of $11.6 billion in 2006. The company participated in gear cutting machine tools as part of its $3.1 billion industrial segment. The world leader in gear cutting machines in 2006 was the German Liebherr Group.

Kennametal Inc.

Kennametal is the largest tool-bit manufacturer in the United States and ranked second globally in the tools and accessories market. The company, originally McKenna Metals Company, owed its growth to a tungsten-titanium carbide alloy developed by its founder, Philip M. McKenna, in 1938 which produced significant productivity increases in machining. Headquartered in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the company reported total sales revenues of $2.4 billion in the fiscal year ended June 2007. Two important foreign tool makers are Mitsubishi Material, with sales in tooling of approximately $1.2 billion in the fiscal year ended March 2007, and Toshiba Tungaloy, with sales in tooling of approximately $414 million in the same period.

General Electric

Through its GE Fanuc Automation Corporation, General Electric is a leading worldwide producer of computerized numerical control and computer-assisted manufacturing systems. The company had 2006 sales revenues of $163.4 billion, but its filings with the SEC subsumes sales of its automation products beneath its broader industrial segment (20.5% of revenues).

Rockwell Automation, Inc.

Rockwell acquired Allen-Bradley in 1985, a leader in numerical control. Rockwell had revenues in 2006 of $5.6 billion, of which control systems accounted for $4.6 billion. Both GE and Rockwell are major exporters of control systems.

MATERIALS & SUPPLY CHAIN LOGISTICS

Machine tools are assembled from engineered products, major subsystems of which are purchased from other industries. Machine tool producers are major consumers of metal components. The top three inputs into the industry in the middle years of the first decade of the 2000s were castings, fabricated metal products, and sheet steel. Hydraulic (fluid power) devices were the fourth-ranked input. Electronic systems used in CNC guidance were fifth in importance. Cutting and forming machines have similar materials requirements; the chief difference is that the latter do not use CNC guidance systems to the same extent because forming operations are far less complex, on average, than machining processes. From a logistical point of view, the industry is located around areas of industrial concentration in the Upper Midwest (near the automobile producers, a major buying group), the Northeast, California, and Texas.

The largest input to the cutting tool and accessories industries is tungsten carbide metal powder, other metal powders, and industrial diamonds—materials that impart hardness to cutting tools. Although the United States has reserves of tungsten ore, the country does not mine the metal and instead relies on secondary tungsten recovered from cutting sludges and from tungsten alloys. Cutting operations are typically cooled by liquids. As cutting edges wear away, the metal is carried off in the coolant. These sludges are inherently valuable because they contain tungsten and are routinely recycled, often traveling hundreds of miles to specialized recycling centers. The world's largest producers of tungsten are China, Russia, and Canada. The largest reserves are in China, Canada, and Russia. Most tungsten imported into the United States comes from Canada.

DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL

The selling of machines, cutting tools, and accessories calls for the services of sales engineers able to understand and to respond knowledgably to the special needs of the customer. For this reason the industry relies heavily on distributors appropriately staffed with engineers intimately familiar with the machinery of the manufacturers they represent. The American Machine Tool Distributors' Association has 300 members; each organization has substantial technical staffing.

Distribution arrangements somewhat depend on the size of the seller and of the buyer. Large companies maintain direct sales staffs calling on the customer directly and assisting distributors; many small companies operate through manufacturers' representatives and distributors. In 2002, as reported by the Census Bureau, the cutting sector had 342 companies; of these 140 had fewer than twenty employees. The forming machine sector had 169 companies, ninety-eight of which were small. Tool sellers use distributors and also deploy extensive Web sites where buyers can identify and also buy cutting devices and auxiliary equipment online.

A significant part of dealer operations is selling used machine tools. There is also a business in making parts and tools for lines of old equipment that are no longer supported because the manufacturers that made them went out of business during the shrinkage of this industry from 1981 to 1990.

KEY USERS

Industrial buyers in the metal fabrication business buy 97 percent of all machine tools; the remainder, in the form of small machines made specifically for these markets, are sold to garages, laboratories, and home workshops. The dominant buying sectors are automobiles, farm and construction equipment, aerospace, and a wide range of industries making heavy metal equipment.

ADJACENT MARKETS

Cutting fluids used to cool all cutting, drilling, and boring operations represent an important adjacent market to machining. These substances are classified as mineral, synthetic, or semi-synthetic. Mineral products are oils usually derived from petroleum. Synthetic cutting fluids are water-based liquids holding alkaline substances like ethanolamine and amber alongside corrosion-inhibitors. Semi-synthetic coolants are oil-water emulsions. Cutting fluids typically contain extreme pressure (EP) additives such as chlorine, sulfur, and phosphorus that help the fluid hold up under the pressures present at the point where the tool and workpiece meet. Synthetic coolants provide the best service.

Abrasives used in grinding, polishing, and lapping applications are another important market. Aluminum oxide is the most widely used abrasive on ferrous metals and silicon carbide is the most widely used on nonferrous metals. Zircona alumina, a mixture of zirconium oxide and aluminum oxide, is used to grind and polish very hard carbon and stainless steels. Abrasives are delivered in mounted forms as bonded or coated abrasives, adhering to a carrying surface and formed into wheels or plates. They also reach the end user in powdered form.

Indirectly adjacent to machining are high-performance plastics, in that these substances are gradually making inroads to replace metal parts in applications that require high strength. Examples of such plastics are polyamidimide, polyimide, polyetherimide, and polyetheretherketon (PEEK). These materials are relatively expensive but lend themselves to forming by injection molding and thus need no machining.

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Research and development in this industry at the basic level, which is often pursued by university departments, is aimed at improving the accuracy of results, novel forms of cutting, improvement in servomotors, automation of machining steps not yet achieved, and further development in CNC methods. Considerable R&D expenditure at the corporate level is dedicated to support specific applications categories for customers, frequently with the financial participation of the customer.

One example of basic research in achieving higher accuracy comes from MIT where a research team headed by Alexander H. Slocum introduced, in 1995, platforms for machining supported on a thin layer of water to reduce vibrations. At the extremely low tolerance required in certain modern applications, even fractional reductions in surface vibration are beneficial to achieve higher rates of accuracy. MIT, which pioneered servomotors in this industry in the 1940s and 1950s, continued to make contributions to the industry in the twenty-first century. Laser cutting of metal was under intense study in the latter half of the first decade of the 2000s. The technology, already in use as an alternative to plasma arc cutting of metal, was still relatively new in the twenty-first century but developing rapidly. In the far distant future, but already much discussed, is the promise of nanotechnology, which may permit the build-up of parts from the molecular level or, minimally, modification of surfaces by rearranging atoms.

CURRENT TRENDS

Trends in this industry were dominated by global developments as the first decade of the twenty-first century was drawing to a close. The most striking of these was the rapid industrialization of China, India, and other major Asian markets that, half a century back, ranked among the most under developed economies of the world. In the latter half of the first decade of the 2000s, China had emerged as the largest single consumer of machine tools, as well as having become a leading producer. From a U.S. perspective, it is noteworthy to see that European industries have shown competitive strength and were holding on to market shares whereas the United States was continuing to yield its share.

The evolving technological landscape suggests that machine tools are being ever more integrated into larger automated complexes. With but a few exceptions, Yamazaki Mazak being one, most major producers are diversified systems manufacturers and machine tools are but one of many major product lines they offer. Materials competition, especially the erosion of metal markets under the onslaught of plastics, has not yet reached deeply into major durable goods, but trends suggest that more competition in the future is likely to affect machine tools.

TARGET MARKETS & SEGMENTATION

The industry's products divide two major segments: stand-alone and single-purpose machines which do one thing well, drilling or boring; and multi-function devices which offer more than one machining function on the same machine, drilling, milling, and grinding, for example. Such machines, installed in automated lines, are very flexible when guided by CNC functions—capable of changing their own tools and capable, in conjunction with video sensors, and of recognizing different products approaching them on the assembly line. In the most complex computer-assisted manufacturing systems, machine tools become components of systems that function as mere organs in a manufacturing process. Marketing approaches—sales methods and requisite cooperative work with the ultimate buyer—depend largely on the function and complexity of the product.

RELATED ASSOCIATIONS & ORGANIZATIONS

American Machine Tool Distributors' Association, http://www.amtda.org

The Association of Manufacturing Technology (AMT), http://www.amtonline.org

Forging Industry Association, http://www.forging.org

Industrial Tungsten Industry Association (ITIA), http://www.itia.org.uk

The Metal Forming Machinery Makers' Association, http://www.mmma.org.uk/page.asp?node=1&dec=Home

National Tooling & Machining Association, http://www.ntma.org/eweb/StartPage.aspx

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Thomson, Elizabeth A. "MIT Researchers Win Again in R&D Competition." Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 8 November 1995. Available from ?http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1995/researchers-win-1108.html?.

"Tungsten Carbide—An Overview." Azom.com. Available from ?http://www.azom.com/details.asp?ArticleID=1203?.

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see also Construction Machinery, Hand Tools