American Machinist

"Mastercam Helps to Increase Machine Shop's Profits."

Mike Everson, co-owner of Middleton Machining and Welding, (MMW), often takes on parts that are tough to machine. He has noticed that when engineers find out about his company’s abilities, they design parts that would be difficult, and in some cases impossible, to produce without his CAM software’s surfacing capability. These same surfacing capabilities have also helped the company increase its profits.

Middleton Machining and Welding in Middleton , WI was started to get both co-owners through school. It began in a small basement in 1987 making parts for the instrumentation industry, such as mass spectrometers, using a small lathe and mill. It grew from there to 42,000 square feet in two buildings, and 28 people with over 25 machine tools. They are currently producing parts, both in billet and sheet metal, for the medical and scientific industries. They have recently opened a sheet metal production facility with state-of-the-art sheet metal fabrication equipment.

“It’s all instrumentation, lab-type equipment, very high-end machined components,” said Everson. “We also make parts for some race cars. It’s a hobby of mine.

MMW makes parts for Nextel Cup NASCAR and NHRA drag racing teams. “We make primarily engine components. They are generally designed with incredibly high tolerances and complicated geometries. Pretty neat stuff,” Everson explained.

For instrumentation companies, MMW makes the mechanical components for different equipment. “If you go to the eye doctor, and you wonder who makes all the dials and the very nice components that the technician is adjusting to get a measurement, that’s what we make,” he said.

These parts fall into two categories for MMW - prototypes and production runs. They’ll produce high-end components in low volumes. “For us, if we do 50 pieces, that’s a pretty big run,” added Everson. However, MMW also does large production runs and has the capability to do both lathe and mill work with Mazak and Milltronics’ equipment. Machines offer from two to four axis capabilities, and bar-feeding.

To offer the best CAM functionality and stay current with the latest software technology, Everson said they use Mastercam CAD/CAM software for their machine-tool programming needs.

He noted, “We’ve found that Mastercam is easier to use than Mazak’s Mazatrol system. But we use Mastercam for a different reason than what you might think. Most of our customers draw parts in SolidWorks ® . So, one of the things we do here well is that our programmer Bob Hinds can take a solid model from one of our customers and do the conversion directly in Mastercam and make the part printless. You’ve already got the code developed in Mastercam, which is much more efficient than to prototype the part at the equipment’s controller. Then we can go directly to production with it. We have to change very few things. This is a very, very powerful tool for us where we catch a lot of errors from the engineers who originally produced it, especially when we go to prototype. A lot of the mistakes are caught right up front. P robably one of the single most important features of Mastercam is its ability to recognize SolidWorks and other CAD generated files.”

Everson found that Mastercam has cut his programming time in half. Instead of losing money on programming, he turned it into a profit center. “Now, if Hinds has more than an hour and a half or two hours in part programming, it must be quite a part. When we can go directly from the model and start making toolpaths from it right away, that’s pretty important.”

Tool collisions can also be a problem for job shops, but Everson found that Mastercam allows him to set up a starting boundary that represents the raw stock to be machined. With the verification in backplotting, Mastercam allows the user to see where there could be gouges or collisions. “Mastercam is fairly easy to use, and it has an awful lot of facets,” said Everson. “If there is an operator error, say for instance a Z-axis movement is incorrect, which comes along with human programming, Mastercam’s verifications and backplotting will allow us to find that crash before it occurs in real time on the machine.”

Surfacing using Mastercam is a very important feature that Hinds uses regularly. Everson said, “Often, surfacing cuts down on the tools that you have to buy. If there are particular angles and features that would normally require some sort of special form tool, with Mastercam you can generally just program off the model and use common tools to do the surfacing or the contouring to make the part for the customer. Then for production, we can always buy a special form tool to reduce the production cost. But it allows us to speed up the prototyping of a new product by using tools that are on hand.”

Hinds added that with Mastercam’s capability, their customers’ engineers who are designing parts are doing ones that “would be difficult, and in some cases impossible, without the surfacing ability of Mastercam. It just makes things so much easier for us and them. With Mastercam, we mimic the models that the engineers send us exactly.”

Everson also likes the short turnaround time for parts that Mastercam allows. Often, an engineer can send them a solid model, they program it in Mastercam, and have the part sometimes later that same day.

“I was working on a job that had an angled cavity that went from a shallow area to a deeper one just off center of that cavity,” remarked Everson. “I was able to go in there through a pilot hole with a flat end mill to rough it, and then finish with a ball mill. The end result was absolutely beautiful. It was very painless. The number of surfacing features that Mastercam offers, such as the flowline, shallow, contour, and pencil toolpaths, will allow the user to get just about any contoured feature done and done quite well.”

Bob Hoaas from Voell Machinery introduced MMW to Mike Mattera, the local Mastercam representative. “ Mike has always been very helpful to us,” said Everson. “He has always been willing to take the time to show us Mastercam techniques when he stops by. Over the years, we just stayed with Mastercam. We definitely had people come through wanting to sell us something else. But Mastercam has been a very good product for us.”

Hinds said, “Right now, I am doing the vast majority of the Mastercam work. However, we have realized that having other people on board with Mastercam knowledge is a benefit. So we do have an in-house training program. We are bringing two other people along and they’re showing some great progress in learning the program.”

Hinds said that the company has three seats of Mastercam linked into a network. “This allows the programmers or select machinists to access Mastercam throughout the shop at any one of the work stations we have. It’s very convenient. Say, for instance, a program went out on the floor from prototyping, and the person running the part says ‘you know, we can increase the feed by other thousandths per revolution’, or per flute, or whatever it might be, and he can make the changes. That change will then be on our network and available to the next person using Mastercam for that part.”

To be a better and more efficient job shop, Everson said they’ve invested the time in setting up their materials and tool library in Mastercam. It reflects the tools that they have on hand, including their cut lengths, diameters, overall lengths, descriptions, and more. So when a person is generating a toolpath, they can go to the library, select a tool and it’s guaranteed to exist in their physical inventory. The materials library has also allowed them to set up speeds and feeds that reflect real-time machining in most cases. In any given day, they may be making parts from plastics to high alloy steels. So when a person selects a tool in Mastercam, the material library already contains all the speeds and feeds necessary for it - it’s just a matter of clicking on the tool and they’re all ready to go.

Hinds added, “I absolutely love it. You just click on the tool and you’re done with it. Now of course, every part and application can either go faster or slower to get the optimum effect. In prototyping, we do the best we can to make them run as fast as possible. But in production, the tweaking begins. Even with the materials and tooling library, which is a wonderful feature, a great time-saving feature, there are still tweaks that can be done.

However with Mastercam’s flexibility, Hinds can easily make the tweaks needed and add them into the program to give their machine tools even greater productivity. It’s just another way to make their impossible parts, possible.