Whether it’s using EDGECAM to program complex parts for the medical, military and aerospace markets on three different types of milling machine, or nesting and laser cutting surgical blades with RADAN, the software is essential for keeping a precision engineering subcontractor competitive.
High speed CNC machining of complex, precision components from a variety of materials mainly aerospace grade aluminum, titanium and stainless steel. Quantities vary from small batches and prototypes, right up to machine runs of 100 or more.
The Company has invested heavily in new machine technology and needed a software package that could program all their milling machines efficiently. “Following a market sweep we narrowed it down to a shortlist of three, and EDGECAM won convincingly,” says Ian Mence.
All milling work is programmed on EDGECAM at the Tewkesbury-based company, in the same way that every surgical blade is created by a RADAN program that drives their Trumpf Trumatic laser (pictured right). This produces 10,000 blades of different varieties and sizes each month, which means they need to ensure absolute minimum material wastage. RADAN’s powerful nester takes care of that, calculating the most efficient way of nesting a set of blades.
And Ian Mence says importing files into RADAN and EDGECAM couldn’t be easier. “Typically, for the precision machined components we get a PDF file of the drawing and a solid model which has been generated by a design CAD package, typically SolidWorks or ProE. Our programmer Dave Williams (pictured left) imports the model into EDGECAM, creates the machining model and the machine program and exports it to the Machine after proving the program off-line.
“For the surgical blades, dxf file formats are imported into RADAN which then nests them onto the pre-determined sheet size for each thickness we use; we can then export the machine program directly to our Laser and cut the blades.
The company, which was established in 1960, still has customers who have been with them almost from the start. Currently they are running almost to capacity at their 22,000 square foot premises which is a nice problem to have, says Ian Mence.