Word: pressing
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Indeed, Cheney is so attuned to the vagaries of his heart that when he was awakened last Wednesday around 3:30 a.m. by a discomfort in his chest, he realized at once that he couldn't dismiss it as simple indigestion. It wasn't intense pain, Cheney told the press two days later. But, he said, "it lasted long enough, it was steady enough, it didn't change when I breathed deeply or moved around" that he decided--correctly--to have it checked without delay. (See this week's Personal Time: Your Health...
...repeated requests for information, his doctors have declined to say much about the four bypass grafts that were stitched into Cheney's heart 12 years ago. Typically, such grafts last 15 years or so before they have to be replaced. Cardiologists trying to read between the lines of the press releases assume his grafts must be holding up, because the stent was not placed in a bypassed artery...
...little machine in West Lebanon is known as a powder metallurgy press, and to most manufacturers, there ought to be nothing especially new about it. Powder presses have been around for 70 years, stamping out everything from truck-motor parts to medical equipment. Remarkably common though they are, these machines are remarkably crude. Most powder presses are great, loud, chugging things, about the size and shape of a tractor trailer and demanding the ministrations of at least 200 people to keep them running through a workweek. Retooling the presses to switch from making one component to another can take days...
...measure, a renaissance in manufacturing is long overdue. Traditional powder presses are not the only low-tech way parts have been built over the years; stamping machines, casting machines and forging machines are used to melt or muscle metal into shape. Not only are these machines imprecise, they are also fantastically expensive and hard to come by. A start-up company that wants to manufacture parts for a new product may have to wait two years for a press to be built and delivered. Not exactly the quick turnaround time we've come to expect in the age of silicon...
...powder press may change all that, turning American industry on its head. That, as it happens, is exactly what company CEO Alan Beane, 52, has wanted to do for most of his professional career. Born in Laconia, N.H., Beane, like so many New England natives, developed an admiration for the rugged factory culture that defines this corner of the country. He had manufacturing in his blood; in his youth he spent Sunday mornings poking about his grandfather's Dartmouth Woolen Mills, which produced green blankets for the U.S. military. "My image of factories came from those mornings in the mill...