Thomson Industries has added a real-time special machining configuration capability to its online shaft selector tool. The new functionality enables customers to reduce the time spent in customising round rail shafting for their application needs to mere minutes instead of hours or even days.
Typically, a customer uses the Thomson shaft selector to specify materials, size or other standard characteristics for their round rails, but if they needed any special machining such as threads, reductions, ring grooves or radial holes, they would have to submit a drawing or configure the shaft in a one-on-one session with a sales engineer.
With the online tool’s new add-on feature, Thomson says customers can configure their shaft’s special machining themselves, interacting with a 2D drawing that updates in real time to reflect how configuration changes impact the design, pricing and lead time. It also avoids compatibility errors, such as spacing conflicts or a radial hole that is too large for the specified diameter, displaying only those options that fit your specified configurations.