SHOP SOLUTIONS Continued from P48
quality of workmanship and accountability on the shop floor,” John Sommer said. “If there’s a problem at any point on the process, we know where it is and can fix it. Ultimately that means better service to our customers, better job cost control, and higher profits.” For Reliable EDM, probably the biggest gain from Realtrac has been their ability to be more responsive to their custom- ers’ needs. Before implementing Realtrac’s shop control system, there wasn’t a dependable system to track where a job was on Reliable’s shop floor. “Our accuracy on every aspect of a job is greater than ever before. We can predict delivery dates better and respond to customer needs during the job and even six months or a year down the road,” said John Sommer. “With Realtrac 10, we know the exact loca- tion of every job. There’s no more running around asking the whole shop where a specific job is. It has greatly helped our company to be more productive.” For more information from Realtrac, go to
www.realtrac.com, or phone 734-793-3811.
Small Bore Machining Dmin from 2.5mm (0.098”)
The AMS boring system offers a large variety of tools for many different applications. The ground shank ensures accurate insert positioning and guaranteed repeatability.
The Facts: Min bore 0.098” Up to 1.181” projection Coolant through Universal TiAlN coating
Continued from P41
Software Speeds 3D EOAT Build for Molding Robot
B
emis Manufacturing (Sheboygan Falls, WI) is the largest manufacturer of toilet seats in the world and a leading
producer of healthcare products, custom plastic products and precision plastic parts. The family-owned company also manufactures plastic lawn, commercial, indoor furniture, and a host of various contracted extrusion and injection- molded plastic parts for companies such as John Deere and Whirlpool Corp. The company is a pioneer of co-injec- tion molding, a process in which virgin resin is injected with recycled plastic.
Dmin from 2.5mm (0.098”) Turning Grooving Chamfering Threading Axial Copy Call: 1-800-943-4426 or
www.arnousa.com 92
AdvancedManufacturing.org | June 2015
The company has a small machine shop that is primarily kept busy building tooling for the company’s plastic extrusion and injection molding operations. The CNC software used in the past to generate programs for producing these tools was difficult and time-consuming to use, taking about eight hours to produce the typical program, according to Danny Little- john, machinist for Bemis. As an example, the machine shop was recently asked to build replacement left and right hand end-of-arm tooling (EOAT) for a robot used to automate an injection molding operation. The EOAT is rather complicated to build because the front side has a vacuum gripper used to carry inserts that it places in the mold before the mold is filled. After the mold is filled and opened, different grippers on the back side of the EOAT are used to lift the part out of the mold. The original EOAT was built by an outside supplier and destroyed in a crash. Littlejohn was asked to build a replacement in as little time as possible to keep production going at full speed. “In the past, I used a 2.5D software package that was not able to import solid models and machine contoured surfaces. This meant that there was a large class of parts that it was unable to produce CNC programs for all together,” Littlejohn said. “The programmer typically had to start from scratch with a new part rather than working with an existing solid model. This was a long and drawn-out process and it wasn’t helped by the fact that the old software was not very intuitive to use.” Upgrading to the 3D version of the software package was an option but Littlejohn was having so much trouble with the 2.5D version that he didn’t want to upgrade. Littlejohn entered very simple programs into the machine controller but there was no way to simulate the program without actually
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186 |
Page 187 |
Page 188 |
Page 189 |
Page 190 |
Page 191 |
Page 192 |
Page 193 |
Page 194 |
Page 195 |
Page 196 |
Page 197 |
Page 198 |
Page 199 |
Page 200 |
Page 201 |
Page 202 |
Page 203 |
Page 204 |
Page 205 |
Page 206 |
Page 207 |
Page 208 |
Page 209 |
Page 210 |
Page 211 |
Page 212 |
Page 213 |
Page 214 |
Page 215 |
Page 216 |
Page 217 |
Page 218 |
Page 219 |
Page 220 |
Page 221 |
Page 222 |
Page 223 |
Page 224