Mastercam Helps Produce Tasty Treats

March 2006

Cookies, cakes, or baked goods are high on everyone’s list of tasty treats. Many of these have unusual shapes such as holiday Christmas trees. At one time, these shapes were often produced with dies made by hand at Moline Machinery in Duluth, MN. But now, the company has gained far greater efficiency to produce them with advanced machine tools and CAD/CAM software.

Moline Machinery, a family-run company in business for 55 years, is a leading manufacturer of industrial baking equipment for the production of donuts, sweet goods, pastries, pizza crusts, cookies, and specialty breads. They specialize in automated systems and lines for intermediate and high-volume production by wholesale bakers and food processors. Unusual cutters that produce shapes from dough like Christmas trees, bells, animals, or just about any type of figure is just one of the product lines that Moline Machinery is noted for, but one that has changed significantly with the use of advanced manufacturing methods.

At one time, producing these unique and often one-off dough cutters was done by hand forming and fabricating steel to the correct cutter shape, welding the cutters to a sheet of steel, then forming this sheet of steel around a cylinder. With this method, as you can guess, the cutters were stretched around the cylinder and often didn’t come out perfect, but good enough for most applications said Corky Brown, Engineering Technician. After 30 years of experience, Brown said that he could figure out how to make a cutter so when it was placed around the cylinder, his design compensated for any stretching that occurred.

“One of our product lines is special rotary cutters. About three years ago, all of them were custom manufactured by hand. That’s all I did was make these custom cutters for probably 25 or 30 years. I made them for so many years that I could look at a design and say, ‘OK, I know that’s going to be close enough,’ and I built them pretty well,” he explains.

Cutters can be either standalone types sold separately to individuals or small bakeries, or industrial ones that could be 42” long and 10” or 12” in diameter.

Brown says, “Mom and Pop bakeries weren’t that fussy about cutters, but larger baking companies were. They were weighing all their dough in grams, and each cutter would produce a different product weight, causing inconsistencies. So they’d start spending more money on a cutter to achieve proper weights.”

With these types of problems, hand fabrication wasn’t the best or most efficient way to build cutters. Brown felt there had to be a better way.

That’s when their President Gary Moline decided they had to do something, too. They looked at many different machining centers. Once they found the right ones - two Mori Seiki SVL 50/20 vertical machining centers with a fourth rotary axis - they looked at software for programming them. After reviewing all the various CAD/CAM software packages, they had Roger Peterson and his Prototek Engineering team of Brian Pasco and Rob Anderson come to Moline to show them Mastercam CAD/CAM software (CNC Software, Inc., Tolland, CT).

“It was kind of mind-boggling at first,” states Brown. “We saw what Mastercam could do and what some of the other packages could not do, especially laying out an entire machining program. I could actually lay out baking cutters in 2D then roll them onto the cylinder and all the dimensions would be correct. Mastercam’s software capabilities allowed us to make cutters out of whatever material our customers wanted, such as steel, stainless steel, aluminum, and plastic, because we weren’t tied to using steel sheets and hand-formed cutters anymore. Now we can cut from all types of cylinders.”

After reviewing the offerings of every software supplier, they found that two issues pointed to a clear advantage for Mastercam. They liked the idea of working in 2D, and Mastercam has plenty of easy-to-use features for 2D machining. The user-defined Work Coordinate System would allow Moline to orient view, construction, and tool planes of a cutter without having to move it in 3D space. The new planes and origins were then easily transferred to G-code.

Every time they machine a form cutter into a rotary cylinder form, the form cutter has to be compensated for wrapping around the cylinder’s radius. Brown says that Mastercam takes the radius into consideration.

“With some of the other software we’ve tried, you actually had to program the cutter using a cylinder and a 3D pattern. With Mastercam, I can do it in a flat 2D pattern. I can do all my toolpaths, pocketing, everything in that 2D profile, which is a very big plus,” he says.

Now, instead of making cutters from sheet steel, forming the pattern by hand, welding them to a sheet of steel, and wrapping them around a cylinder, Brown says that the actual cutter form is machined right from a cylinder that is about 5-1/2” in diameter by 6” long, usually made from aluminum. The largest one Brown produced was 18” in diameter by roughly 42” long.

Brown explains, “Now when we do cutters on the machining center, they’ll produce products with all identical weights. Dough weights are so much more consistent, and that’s what the big bakers like. Also, we’ve found that a company will buy a box for its product. Then they’ll buy the cutter and try to fit the finished product into the box instead of doing it the other way around. Now we don’t have to worry about that. We can say, ‘OK, if you’re looking for a product that has to fit into a 16” x 32” pan, we can make it fit in that pan and not have any worries about it.’”

Mastercam’s machining simulation is another feature that is very important to Brown. For one 18” roll die that Brown put cutters around, he laid out two rows of cutters to make sure he had his spacing correct. “It was one of those dumb things where you put a wrong number in the program,” he explains. “When I translated them into the program, somehow I got it off about 1/16 of an inch. Well, looking at it on screen, you don’t really notice it. The centerlines of the cutters were actually overlapping by 1/16 of an inch, and looking at it on the computer screen, I couldn’t really see it. As soon as I turned my simulator on and watched it, all of a sudden, it was cutting into a cup. I went back and looked at it, and once I did some measuring, I found the mistake right away. Without catching the error, I would have scrapped out probably a $4,000 to $5,000 piece of material.”

He adds, “We had one that was a very complex configuration, and I know for sure that it would have been pretty near impossible to do it by hand. With Mastercam software, I was able to achieve it quite easily. It had six cups across with many intricate little angles. It took somewhere around 90 hours to machine it, because we were using these small endmills, and getting into tight corners. However, with Mastercam we were able to do these cuts on-screen, making sure everything was correct by using the verification feature of the software. With this Mastercam feature, I can zoom up close and see any little thing I want to look at.”

Moline also makes multiple-form style cutters. Brown adds that he made one that had three different configurations on it. “If I had to do that the old way, it would be very difficult. Working with the Mastercam software, all I do is basically draw my border around the cylinder and I position my cups to get the best pattern. Then I just start cutting chips and I know it’s going to come out exactly like I have it on screen.”

“Every single program is different,” adds Brown. “The biggest thing against trying to use previously done programs is the cylinder changes size. But, with Mastercam, as opposed to other software I’ve tried, I can take one of those old programs and scale the cup down and regenerate it and the dimensions change as needed. I don’t have to redraw anything. We do that all the time. With other software, if you make a cutter one way, and all of a sudden you want to change its rotation, you have to change all the machining points that you just programmed. In Mastercam, I don’t have to do this. I can just rotate it, regenerate it, and it’s done.”

The other exclusive feature from Mastercam that Moline likes is the 4-axis Roll Die programming that delivers easy results on special job roll dies. This is particularly important because the company is so involved in special orders. They also find that with full associativity, they can capture the knowledge of previously programmed parts, which would be invaluable to their specialty cutter business. It is a huge competitive plus for them.

As to training, Brown says, "I can't say enough about the training we received from our local Mastercam Reseller. Now I'm comfortable and I find that the combination of my experience and the power of Mastercam translates to better, faster solutions for our customers." Moline can now look at faster design changeover and meet tougher delivery demands. For instance, a plastic roll cutter can be produced in one day versus the two weeks in the hand-made days. A steel cutter takes a little longer…just two days!