About Microlution > About Micro-Manufacturing

Companies depend upon a number of processes to competitively create today's products. Mechanical machining, the focus of Microlution's technology, is a cutting process that uses a tool to remove material from a workpiece to obtain the finished part. A machine tool, the piece of equipment used for mechanical machining, is a flexible device that is capable of creating a wide range of parts from metal, plastic, glass, composites, ceramics and other materials. Modern machine tools are sophisticated, servo-motor driven, computer controlled devices that can operate in a fully-automated manner.

The existing machine tools used for micromachining are Too Expensive, Too Large, Too Complex, and Too Inflexible for today's challenges. The machine tool technology has evolved awkwardly from adequately being able to handle macro-scale applications to poorly addressing small parts and high accuracy requirements associated with micromachining. Typical micro-machined parts are currently manufactured on machine tools that take up 50 square feet of factory space and cost over $300,000. Many of these parts are only a few millimeters across and thus scale poorly with the large working volumes of traditional milling machines. In addition, traditional machine tools are expensive to operate, gulping cutting fluids and hogging energy while they move their huge internal components.

Furthermore, operating these machines is very complex and requires experienced, skilled technicians and support staff. Finally, these issues conspire to make current systems inflexible - high volume production runs are required for profitability. The current evolution of machine tools for micro-manufacturing is not addressing these problems. Traditional machine tool manufacturers' approach of building more precision and performance into their products in an incremental manner is continually making the equipment more expensive, larger and more complex.

Microlution directly addresses the shortcomings of traditional machine tools. Microlution offers micro scale manufacturing products and services based upon innovative micro/mesoscale machine tool (mMT) technology that properly addresses the unique requirements of micro scale manufacturing. mMT technology was developed on the concept that small parts should be manufactured on small machines specifically designed for micro scale manufacturing. mMTs are 10 times smaller, 4 to 7 times less expensive, and much less complex to operate than traditional machines currently in the market. Therefore, Microlution's currently available milling machines, utilizing mMT technology, are a better solution for many micro machining applications.