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News

15-Employee Company uses NX CAM to Beat Offshore Mold Makers

September 26, 2018

 

The company had kept up with its investments in machining centers, but recently found their existing software was coming up short to take full advantage of them.

 

Their CAD/CAM process looked like this:

 

• Export CAD data in a neutral format

 

• Import the data into the CAM system

 

• Deal with transfer and translation errors and hampered productivity

 

And as you would expect, it made design changes complicated, harder to track and difficult to implement. On top of that, the current software wasn’t handling their 5-axis machines well.

 

Switching to Siemens NX, JK Machining found specialized mold-design features in addition to traditional CAD/CAM capabilities. Their NX package had mold-specific capabilities, 5-axis & high-speed machine programming function, and a key aspect of NX CAM: the CAD is fully available for users to edit a CAD part, then seamlessly go back and forth between CAD and CAM, virtually eliminating room for errors.

 

When starting freshly won projects, the company uses the specialized mold-design features of NX Mold Wizard to create the mold base and design cores, cavities, runners, cooling lines and other features. Undercuts and places where more draft is needed are also pointed out by NX, and users can automate aspects such as BOM creation and other repetitive tasks by adding them to mold design libraries. The NC programmers work directly from the CAD model and use NX design functions to design electrodes and prepare models for machining.

 

For the full article, please visit Modern Machine Shop magazine.

 

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