Delcam’s FeatureCAM ease of use wins competition

"This year's part, a 3-gear planetary gearbox, was one of the toughest I have ever seen in a competition," said Rick Huddleston, the instructor who coached the team. "I was extremely proud of our team members who quickly designed, programmed and built the part to the tight specifications required." Even though they had just one year of training beyond high school and had never worked in industry, the Tulsa Tech team competed in the adult division, primarily against people with substantial industry experience. The team spent the first half hour figuring out their basic strategy to machine the part. Two of the team creating the geometry of the gearbox in SolidWorks and FeatureCAM, while the third member set up the work-holding and tooling on the machine. "The ease of transferring geometry between the two packages made it possible to do different parts of the modelling in whichever software made the most sense without any penalty," commented Mr. Huddleston. The team created the geometry of the gears in FeatureCAM then automatically generated the 2D geometry of the gear. The next step was extruding the gears into solids and doing some minor editing to meet the design specifications. After all of the components were created, the technical data package, including assembly model, bill of materials and 2D manufacturing drawings, was produced in SolidWorks. Then, the team members used FeatureCAM to automatically detect the features in the geometry and generate machining toolpaths. After programming the parts, the team used FeatureCAM's machining-time estimation to determine the cycle time. This information was used as part of the process for making a quote that was another of the required deliverables.