CADCAM/PRODUCTION IT SUPPLEMENT
PLOTTING A PATH FOR PRODUCTION
Esprit reseller, Victor Davila of Shape
Design, was brought in to assist. He notes:
“We helped GeoSpace by showing them
what they could achieve with Esprit. When
we met them, they had great machines and
employees. One part was missing. They
were held back by inefcient CAM software.
Getting more efcient, newer machines
made this bottleneck more visible. I told
them they could write code and take it to the
machine and run good parts the rst time.”
After training on the new software, Henry
focused on improving the program to
produce a part called an end bell for the
company’s OBX product. While doing seismic
mapping, this part protects electronic
components from pressure at the ocean
oor with the use of six O-ring seals. Too
complex to be injection moulded, the end
bells are machined from plastic at a rate of
almost 50,000 per year.
The GeoSpace Technologies’ programmer
opened the Solidworks solid model of the
part in Esprit and used the software’s
automatic feature recognition component to
identify the machining operations required to
produce it. In a few cases, Henry manually
created features, based on his own ideas on
how the part should be produced. For
example, he combined a bore and a
counterbore into a single feature, so that
both could be produced with a single tool.
“We decided to ip the part around front
to back in the machine, because it is easier
GeoSpace end bells are produced more
effi ciently on a Miyano turning centre
programmed using Esprit
to deploy two spindles on the front side of
the part, which also has most machining
operations,” Henry said. The programmer
set about assigning machining operations to
maximise turret utilisation. For example,
originally, two radial drilled and tapped holes
were produced one after another by a single
turret. With the new software system they
are now machined simultaneously on the
front side of the machine via two
synchronised turrets.
An axial through-hole with several steps
was previously drilled and bored with four
different tools. The programmer changed
this so that after the hole is drilled, a single
carbide insert tool is held in the positions to
bore all the steps while the part rotates.
Autodesk’s generative design fi nds its
place in subtractive production
For two days in July, Autodesk hosted a London-based edition of Autodesk University.
It provided a push to its cloud-hosted design-to-production collaborative software,
Fusion 360, which it also expanded; saw its cloud- and desktop-hosted production
software offerings move closer together; and saw its ‘poster child’ generative design
capability brought to bear more broadly in a production environment. Andrew Allcock
was there. Read the full report: https://is.gd/azagob
68 November 2019 www.machinery.co.uk @MachineryTweets
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