Dear Shop Doc,
I have recently been asked if my shop does “micro” machining. I’ve done some work on small parts recently, but I’m not exactly sure what is meant by “micro.” Any thoughts?
Small Beginnings
Dear Small Beginnings,
One of the problems with the term “micro” is that it is often used to defne a very small portion of a wide array of categories. Maybe you’ve been to a microbrewery or have a computer that uses a microprocessor. In each case, the prefx or adjective “micro” defnes a small-scale or very small feature of the original term. To date, the term is loosely used in machining to refer either to the exact measurement of the parts, such as in microns, or to a small range of work, in the neighborhood of 1 mm or less.
In May 2010, I posed a similar question to exhibitors and attendees at MM Live—the Micro and Precision Manufacturing Event for North America, in Cincinnati, Ohio. As an exhibitor myself, I thought micro meant sizes under .050”, as this was the smallest tool in our catalog and very near to the 1 mm dimension. I often referred to parts from this diameter up to .500” diameter as Swiss, so everything smaller I considered micro. A large number of attendees defined micro as being smaller than a certain dimension.
Some said micro meant parts smaller than 8 mm or .250”, or 1 mm. Kyocera’s booth advertised a .250” dimension on their sign. However, when I asked them about it, they explained that although they make a wide variety of small tools, the ones they considered to be micro sized were really those .125” or smaller.
Photo from JMMedical
