Chris has been a member of the Okuma team since 1995, where he first started as Board Repair Technician and has come full circle to lead the department as Supervisor. He received a degree in Electro-Mechanical Engineering Technologies from York Technical College and, since then, has been in the manufacturing industry for 24 years. While with Okuma, Chris worked as a Field Service Technician, where he installed double column machines and troubleshooting electrical and control issues. He has spent several years working and supervising the Okuma Support Center, and now is supervising the Board Repair department.
What’s the value of sacrificing production time to warm up a spindle? There are several reasons to institute a warm-up routine, but for starters, it’s the same reason athletes warm up their muscles before competition. Spindle...
If you’ve been working on CNC machine tools for as long as I have (over 24 years), you may remember the only reason you touched an old CRT screen was to point something out to a coworker. When the first PC-based Okuma control...
When installing and servicing machines as part of the Okuma field service team, I must have found over 1,000 machines with missing, damaged or defeated safety interlocks. When I would bring these issues to the operator’s at...
Okuma lathes and machining centers come equipped with a wide variety of functions—sometimes so many that it can be overwhelming. While you may not need every function, the following are a few that could significantly improve ...
Okuma designs and builds our machine tools to be strong enough to provide many years of use before needing a drive unit replacement (depending on run time, etc.). But as your machine gets older, the day will eventually come w...
Filters serve a boring but very important job on the machine tool. In today’s race toward high-speed, lean manufacturing, filters can easily be overlooked. It’s common knowledge to replace some filters, because they’re stap...
One of the questions I often hear is "why does the machine have a battery?" Each generation of Okuma machine tool controls exists for different reasons. Most are used for holding software or parameters, but some are used for ...
In the day-to-day rush of keeping up with hectic production schedules, it can be easy to push maintenance tasks off to “tomorrow.” But there are some tasks that should not be ignored because they’re relatively easy to perform...
For years in the Support Center at Okuma, I’ve had two things hanging on my cubical wall: my nameplate with my name on it, and a nameplate that says “Hotel California.” In part because it’s a cool song, but mostly because for...
When your CNC machine goes down, productivity and revenue go to zero. Then…it gets worse. All the time spent reviewing the problem costs money too. If you can save time in the CNC repair process, you can save money. In initia...
