Associations
Suppliers
For Metal Finishing Information you can go to the websites of:
- Hudson Plating who we use for zinc plating, cadmium plating, tin plating, silver plating, hard chrome plating, Alodining (chromating on aluminum), and hydrogen embrittlement relief.
- Altech Anodizing who does standard sulphuric acid anodizing, Engineered Hard Coat anodizing, Commercial Hard Coloured anodizing, architectural bronze anodizing, chromating, Electroless nickel plating, hardchrome plating and hot dip black oxide on steel and stainless steel. They also do laser marking and pad printing.
- Spectral Finishing Inc for anodizing.
- Hudson Powder Coating for powder coating.
- Linex Industries Ltd. for powder coating.
- Valley Powdercoat Ltd. for powder coating and chromate conversion coating.
- Surf-Tech Industries Ltd. for powder coating, anodizing and PTFE coating.
- Hi-Tech Fasteners for fasteners.
- Messer Canada for welding gases.
- Samuel, Son & Co. and Precision Steel Warehouse Inc. for supply sheet metal and extrusion.
Equipment Manufacturers
Machine Shop
Haas makes milling machines and lathes in California.
Okuma is a Japanese company that makes lathes and milling machines:
Iemca makes bar feeders for lathes.
Bridgeport's milling machines are the industry standard for knee mills:
CNC Consulting Inc. produces software for machinists and CNC programmers. We use their EDITCNC program that we use in house
Sheet Metal Shop
Trumpf manufactures lasers and punch presses.
Amada makes sheet metal fabrication equipment.
Panasonic makes welding robots.
Lissmac manufactures in-line finishers.
Mitsubishi manufactures lasers and automation systems.
Waterjet Cutting Shop
Omax makes waterjet machining centres.
Laser Cutting Shop
Laser cutting is efficient when cutting curves in thin gauge sheet metal. Punching is still faster if there are many holes and water jet machining is more efficient when material thickness is over .5 inches. We recently installed a fully automated Mitsubishi 4,000 watt laser processing system designed to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week unattended.
Stamping/Tool & Die Shop
Hardened dies need high precision and hardened punch and die sections. These sections are cut on a Japanese Sodick Wire Electronic Discharge Machine (EDM). A fine brass wire under high voltage sparks its way through tough metals in a de-ionized water bath. This allows square corners and accuracies in the range of +/- .0001".
Other Resources
The Professional Metalforming Association (PMA) is a great source of sheet metal information and are associated with the Fabtech International and AWS Welding shows that are held in Chicago and other major American cities.
Thefabricator.com is a great resource for sheet metal fabrication. It has buyer's guides for equipment and is a good jumping off point for information.
Modern Machine Shop is a great online and hard copy information source for machining.
Originally the American Society For Testing and Materials (ASTM) is now known as ASTM International and is now one of the largest voluntary standards development organizations in the world.
ASM International is a Materials Information Society.
Sheet Metal Information including gauge information can be found at here. Basic Machining information can be found here.