Several years ago Tooling & Assembly Solutions, a high-tech machine shop in Simi Valley, California ran into a major bottleneck. President Mike Giboney explained that it was taking him an inordinate amount of time to create 5-axis toolpaths for complex aerospace parts.
The project that pushed him over the edge was a little part that would fit in a breadbox. However, about one-third of it consisted of complex contoured surfaces.
CAM programming was adding too many hours to the project. After spending 40 hours working in the CAM environment on his CAD program and completing only three of the part’s 14 operations, he was discouraged. He said, “When you start adding a lot of geometry and toolpaths to your model, you really increase overhead. The computer starts churning and grinding all these numbers and it slows down badly.”
Having the CAM system in the same operating environment as CAD seems to compound the problem. “Like a good CAD system, our CAD module spent a lot of time looking for changes and updating toolpaths. It would sometimes take 10 or 15 minutes scanning the file as it was being opened.” Giboney came to the conclusion that for this type of part the CAD world and the CAM world needed to be in separate environments to minimize the waiting.
To break this bottleneck, Giboney selected Mastercam, which he compared to a powerful engine that is dedicated exclusively to optimizing the productivity of his fabrication environment. The aerospace part was one of the first Giboney programmed using Mastercam. The SolidWorks model flowed seamlessly into the Mastercam environment.
Soon, he discovered that, for parts with a great deal of surface machining, Mastercam’s ability to import geometry directly from the solid model can save hours of programming time versus programs that require the creation of sketches to delineate surfaces. In just 30 hours, Giboney had programmed all 14 operations. When he was done, it took the software just seven minutes to generate all of the code for the toolpaths: “A file like this would have taken the other software two hours to create,” he said.
He also found that the program had an enormous amount of flexibility for selecting an optimized tool set for his complex parts that require many operations. This can ultimately save many hours of machining per part.
Tooling & Assembly Solutions became a beta site for Mastercam X about six months before its commercial release, and the company has been using it ever since. Giboney thought the basic functionality of the two versions of Mastercam were nearly the same. However, he was pleased to find that Mastercam X has a layer of artificial intelligence operating in the background to make the things he does routinely faster and easier.
Shop owners used to brag about how many CAM stations they had. Giboney says he brags about how few. With Mastercam, Tooling & Assembly Solutions avoided the cost of hiring an additional CAM programmer. More importantly, the time Giboney saves with Mastercam allows him to maintain hands-on involvement in the operation of his business to keep it operating at peak efficiency. |