Okuma Customers Enjoy the Trip of a Lifetime

Recently we treated a group of 36 Okuma customers to the trip of a lifetime that included a personalized tour of our facilities in Japan along with some unique cultural experiences you won’t find anywhere else in the world. We saw mind-blowingly immense manufacturing plants and the latest in CNC machining technologies and automation. We visited the treasures on display at the Okuma Museum, and yes, we ate poisonous pufferfish and lived to tell the tale! I thought you might like to see what happens during “Americas’ Days,” an annual event put on by Okuma America and our distributors. Here are just a few great memories from our trip.

(Above) Welcome to Japan: Tim Thiessen, Ira Busman, Kyle Klaver, Kevin Kraieski, and Tate Imamura (taking the photo!) greeted customers at the airport and whisked them off to the Nagoya Marriott hotel.

Made It! Okuma customers fresh off the plane, excited to get the adventure underway. (After a little sleep perhaps…)

Tour Day begins at Okuma’s Oguchi headquarters and continues with visits to our smart factories, Dream Sites 1, 2 and 3. Large monitors in the plants provide real-time status updates for machines on the shop floor.

Parts on Display: Customers were impressed by these spindles, with their incredible surface finishes and complexity of milling + drilling + tight tolerances.

Demonstrations of handscraping are always a crowd pleaser, and here one of our customers gives it a try.

The Okuma Museum has tons of fascinating artifacts on display, like this 1930’s/1940’s nameplate that was used to identify a particular machine.

Mealtime is definitely part of the adventure. Here we enjoy shabu-shabu, which involves dipping thinly-sliced raw meat and vegetables into hot water for instant cooking, then trying out a variety of dipping sauces.

In Japan you CANNOT pour your own beer…but don’t worry, I’m always happy to help.

Okuma’s state-of-the-art smart factories are enormous in scale and house row upon row of machine tools.

Mega Metal: On Culture Day we visited Nara, where this colossal Buddha was on display.

No trip to Japan is complete without sampling some poisonous pufferfish. Yes, we did eat “Fugu”, but rest assured, no Okuma owners were ever in any danger. It’s prepared by Certified Fugu Chefs, so it’s guaranteed to be safe!

At the end of the trip, the feeling was unanimous – a great time was had by all.

About Tim Thiessen

Tim Thiessen is Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Okuma America Corporation, a world-leading builder of CNC (Computer Numeric Control) machine tools, founded in 1898 in Nagoya, Japan. Okuma is the industry’s only single-source provider, with the CNC machine, drive, motors, encoders, and spindle all manufactured by Okuma. The company also designs their CNC controls to integrate seamlessly with each machine tool’s functionality.

Company: Okuma America Corporation

Website: www.okuma.com

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This article appeared first on the Okuma America website.