When a shop is capacity constrained, the instinct is to buy another machine. That is the most expensive option on the list and rarely the first one worth trying.
Measure where the time actually goes
Stand at one machine for a full shift with a notebook and record what it is doing every five minutes. Most workshops discover that actual cutting is a minority of the time. Setup, waiting for material, tool changes, inspection and looking for fixtures fill the rest.
Attack setup before you attack cutting
Shaving seconds off a cutting cycle is satisfying and usually marginal. Halving a forty-minute setup is transformative. Practical steps:
- Preset tools offline so the machine is not idle during measurement.
- Keep a dedicated fixture kit per recurring job rather than rebuilding from a common pile.
- Write setup sheets with photographs. Institutional memory should not live in one person.
- Group similar jobs so a setup is amortised across more parts.
Then look at the cut
Once the machine is actually running, the usual gains are in air cutting and conservative approaches. Check rapid positioning, approach distances and whether depth of cut is being left on the table out of caution rather than necessity.
Fix the queue, not just the station
A faster bottleneck simply relocates the bottleneck. Watch where work piles up. Often the constraint is inspection or material handling, and no amount of spindle optimisation will touch it.
When capacity really is the constraint
If you have genuinely exhausted setup and flow improvements, additional capacity is the right answer — and it does not have to be new. Verified used machines and spare capacity from other workshops are both listed on ToolClinic.