Pro/ENGINEER was the most popular computer assisted design tool among the surveyed designers (50%).
communicate with the metalcasting facility and provided the necessary model for casting. This process is used in all our projects, so we didn’t experience any unknown problems. The big challenge was to finish in
such a short amount of time. As far as resources within our
company, we have several bikes in production with cast frames, so we do have internal assistance available. Also, our suppliers for castings are extremely
helpful in getting us through all the phases of the process. In addition to the tools mentioned
above, we also use most of the tradi- tional industrial design tools, including hand sketching. On some projects, we would like
to mill the CAD model to do a dry run for assembly, but timing sometimes does not permit it. As a bigger com- pany, generally we have resources and equipment. Most often, we’re lacking time more than tools.
Designer: Randy Lott
COMPANY: Tool Design Plus LLC, Pataskala, Ohio POSITION: Designer Prior to starting with my current
company, I was working in the pattern shop at Columbus Castings, Columbus, Ohio. The company produces a lot of railroad castings, as well as large mining equipment parts. In my experi- ence with them, I received many CAD models from other companies. We could take the model and add a shrink factor, along with heads, gating and rigging. We would output that modified model as a stereolithography file and then read it in a solidification product. Sometimes, we would not receive a model from the customer and would create one from a drawing using a solid modeling CAD product. The unfortunate part is that when
the casting company gets a CAD model from the customer, it usually is not suit-
44 Metal Casting Design anD PurChasing sePteMber/OCtOber 2010
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