CADCAM/PRODUCTION IT SUPPLEMENT
PLOTTING A PATH FOR PRODUCTION
Fenton’s mould tool and
the fi nished component
generated in WorkNC.
He describes the mould tool as being
“straight open and close,” with two cavity
plates, support plates and back plates,
comprising around 30 different components.
“One of the design challenges was to ensure
there were no side actions or lifters,” Brown
advises.
Within an overall project time of 11
months, the complete tool manufacture took
around six weeks. From initial enquiry in
June 2018, the mould tool order was placed
in December, with the rst production run in
May 2019. The cores and cavities were
machined through WorkNC, with each plate
taking around 25 hours, plus a further 20
hours for the build. Says Fenton’s technical
director: “It was quite a complex format, with
a lot of small solid carbide cutters from a
variety of suppliers. We also used shrink-t
tooling to ensure greater accuracy, balanced
chip loads, better nishes and increased
speed and feed rates.” And he says
WorkNC’s ability to produce high quality
surface nishing kept any additional
polishing to a minimum.
In America, Houston-based GeoSpace
Technologies is using DP Technology’s Esprit
(https://is.gd/calepa) to support the
manufacture of innovative products for the
petroleum industry, including geophones,
printheads and land-to-deep sea systems for
seismic data acquisition. The latter has
become one of the most commonly used
technologies in the industry to search for
subsurface oil and gas.
With GeoSpace’s seismic equipment,
sound data is collected to create maps of
the earth’s subsurface, which allows oil and
gas companies to search for potential or
existing oil- and gas-bearing formations.
The need for accurate and cost-effective
technology continues to grow.
GeoSpace Technologies cannot not rely
on external manufacturing suppliers,
especially overseas suppliers, that have
their own priorities and can’t always be
relied on for on-time deliveries. For example,
it might cost up to $300,000 per day for a
company to charter a large ship for a
geological survey. Forcing a ship to sit at the
dock waiting for equipment to be delivered is
not acceptable.
The company employs over 200
manufacturing employees who build moulds,
perform injection moulding, build printed
circuit boards, machine metal and plastic
components and perform many other
manufacturing operations.
GeoSpace has 33 CNC machine tools, as
well as many manual machines plus auxiliary
equipment. A recent investment has been a
Citizen Miyano (https://is.gd/silefi) ABX-
51TH3, with an upper turret on the left side,
one on the right side, and a lower turret
capable of working on both sides.
The manufacturing engineers at
GeoSpace Technologies initially programmed
the machine with the CAM software they had
been using for years, but ran into difculties
while trying to take full advantage of the
machine’s capabilities. For example,
ensuring complete use of the machine’s
three turrets was complicated by the fact
that simply moving an operation from one
turret to another often required starting the
program from scratch.
Justin Henry, manufacturing manager for
GeoSpace Technologies, was tasked with
the challenge of improving the efciency of
the company’s manufacturing options, with
his top priority upgrading the company’s
CAM software. Says Henry: “I looked at a
few of the market leaders and selected
Esprit from DP Technology, because it
provides the best support I have seen for
advanced machines.”
66 November 2019 www.machinery.co.uk @MachineryTweets
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