A recent wordworking project has given me a greater appreciation of assembly line challenges. Has a home project ever informed your work in the assembly plant?

When David J. Zabrosky, North American sales manager for Schmidt Technology, gets a call from a customer asking for a servo-driven assembly press, the first question he asks is, “Why?”

In April, electronics assembler Mack Technologies completed work on a substantial installation of money-saving technology at its factory in Westford, MA. The company didn’t get a new paste printer, reflow oven or pick-and-place machine. In fact, the plant’s slick new technology had nothing to do with assembly.

A growing number of manufacturers are moving from air tools to electric tools and from corded electric tools to cordless tools.

America’s manufacturing sector gained 14,000 jobs in February, according to the latest data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It has become fashionable lately for some U.S. companies to tout how they’ve reshored production from overseas. Baldor Electric Co. isn’t one of them—it never left. The company has been manufacturing electric motors, drives, bearings and other motion control products in the United States for decades.

Each year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration logs some 100,000 reports of adverse events related to medical devices. More than a third of those are due to human error.

In early March, UAW officials met with workers from Nissan Motor Co.’s assembly plant in Smyrna, TN, to lay the groundwork for a third union representation vote. Plant employees turned down the UAW by a 2-to-1 margin in 2001. A 1989 attempt to organize the plant also failed.

For example, according to the Precision Metalforming Association, 69 percent of U.S. metalworking companies have job openings. However, 91 percent of those companies are experiencing challenges finding qualified employees, and 42 percent describe that difficulty as “severe.”

The latest Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard requires automotive OEMs to meet an average fleet gas mileage of 54.5 mpg by 2025.