The company manufactures automated assembly machines used by many of the world’s leading medical, pharmaceutical, and life science companies that can contain up to 5,000 components, with the machines varying in size from small bench-top assembly aids to 6 by 2.5 m standalone units.
Says production manager Owen Donnelly: “We complete everything in-house: design, development, production, electrical, pneumatics process control, vision inspection and robotics. All the high precision parts are produced in our toolroom on CNC milling machines and lathes programmed with Alphacam.
“Our biggest challenge was getting the components manufactured in the most efficient way. Since introducing Alphacam, this has really increased the speed of toolpath creation.”
However, Donnelly says the biggest revolution was the introduction of Alphacam’s Waveform roughing technique, which slashed machining times, as toolmaker Daniel Monaghan echoes: “Originally, we feared that ramping up the feed and speed rates, as recommended by Alphacam, would damage our cutting tools, so we ran the cycle slowly at first. As soon as we realised how efficiently it worked, our confidence grew and we pushed it to the limit. This is how we work our machines now and it reduces a rough machining cycle by up to half.”
And he adds that it also prolongs tool life. “Machining the conventional way, the cutters would last two months. But with Waveform machining, and by utilising the full cutter flute length, rather than just the bottom end of the tool, they don’t need replacing for six months, and the finishing cutters are lasting eight months. It’s saving us a lot of money on cutting tools,” Monaghan confirms.
More generally, the ease of the whole programming process is underlined. Says the toolmaker: “I extract the solid model [from the SolidWorks CAD information] and check the radii to see what size cutters are required, including any ballnose cutters for 3D milling, then I check what roughing cycles are required for pockets and holes, and any 3D work.”
Once that is completed, the program is created and a simulation run. The required material is prepared – usually aluminium, stainless steel, ertalyte polymer or acetal. After setting up the material on the machine, a list of tools is created. The final program is then run to machine the required product.
Monaghan underlines that Alphacam CADCAM software makes his job much easier, reducing required programming time, stress and errors: “For example, if we were selecting a number of holes before, we would really have to focus on the various sizes, resulting in potential errors. Now Alphacam groups them together, saving time and eliminating the risk of errors.”
This article was first published in the September 2016 issue of Machinery magazine.
