grooving bars. Iscar has developed a secondary bar holding solution for use with their Pico line of tools, he said. “By go- ing from what used to be the industry standard of two-screw clamping of the tool to three-point-contact clamping,” East said, “we were able to take our repeatability on this ID boring operation from 50 to 5 µm, both radially and axially.” To put that into perspective, a human hair is about 100-µm thick.
“It was the move to three-point clamping that allows us to get to that level of precision,” East said. “To this day I have yet to see any of our competitors publish anywhere near the 5-µm repeatability axially and radially. The closest any have gotten that I’ve seen is 50-µm axially and 20-µm radially.”
Model-Based Definition The connection between part designers and manufac-
turers has also become much tighter with the advent of software-aided designing for manufacturability. “One big change the industry has seen is the move toward MBD, or model-based definition,” said Keith Goodrich, a product specialist at CNC Software Inc. (Tolland, CT), the makers of Mastercam software.
“Although not specific to the medical industry, the effects
are felt strongly in this corner of manufacturing,” Goodrich said. “Designers and their customers weigh aesthetics heav- ily in the medical industry, smooth transitions from one fea- ture to the next are increasingly more important and always difficult to define on 2D blueprints. Using MBD, a profile toler- ance to a supplied model or individual feature of a supplied model is extremely simple to convey from the designer to the manufacturing engineer.”
“Medical shops realize that if we can extend their tool life by 20%, that’s great—but if we can extend their productivity by 20%, well, they’re jumping over buildings at that.”
This move to MBD has a further impact on the task of machining medical components, Goodrich explained: It has streamlined the process from manufacturing to inspection. “Instead of a machine operator requiring custom gaging to check 2D blueprint callouts—which is cumbersome, time consuming, and often unnecessary with respect to a part’s design intent—a first-article inspection using a CMM or opti-
cal scanner can quickly confirm a MBD profile tolerance has been met,” he said. According to Goodrich, the latest iterations of Master-
cam are further addressing the productivity concerns of the medical market through an ongoing project the company calls “Rest Machining—a quick way for manufacturing engineers or programmers to target material left behind in a machining operation.” He explained that Mastercam’s Stock Model feature can calculate the shape of the stock—the material from which a part is being machined—anywhere in the process the programmer desires. So, when referencing a Stock Model and a finished part model, Mastercam’s toolpaths can be set to only machine areas where material protrudes from the finished part model. “Taking this approach saves our customers time and money by efficiently targeting only the stock left on the part, and not having to waste machine time ‘air-cutting’ over already finished areas,” Goodrich said.
LIFTING
• Flat lift ratings of 220 to 4,400 lbs.
PERMANENT CLEAN UP
• For OEM applications & machinery
• Push, hang & trailer-type sweepers
Booth 1644
March 2016 |
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