 |
| |
| “We use Mastercam to program all of our cabinetry for very custom business —aircraft. It makes it very easy for the technicians out on the floor to assemble these parts and we love it. Without our CNC routers we couldn’t be doing the volume or getting the repeatability we do now. ” |
- Justin Howell
Supervisor CNC Operations
Midcoast Aviation |
| |
|
|
 |
Justin Howell thinks that his job, CNC Operations Supervisor for Midcoast Aviation (Cahokia, IL), is like being a fighter pilot. That's because so many things are flying in at him at once. In his department two routers and a newly added waterjet cutting machine are in use without pause 24 hours a day, typically seven days a week, to support the material requirements of 123 of its own assemblers and several outsource manufacturing vendors.
|
| |
In Justin’s department two routers and a newly added waterjet cutting machine are in use without pause 24 hours a day, typically seven days a week, to support the material requirements of 123 of its own assemblers and several outsource manufacturing vendors.
Those are just the hands that assemble cabinetry for Midcoast Aviation’s green aircraft completion center in Cahokia, IL. The CNC shop also kits sheets of material and makes tooling for the company’s composites manufacturing operations, cuts parts -- including sheet metal that is used for maintenance and refurbishing, and supplies kits of material for its sister company Savannah Air Center in Savannah, Georgia.
To stay on top of this torrent of work, the company has three Mastercam X3 Router seats and six full-time programmers including Howell. Three work on the first shift, two on the second, and one on the third. Programming is not a bottleneck. The company can still add three additional programmers with the existing licenses and more programmers are being identified and trained.
Howell explained that when he became a programmer he was sent to a course with Mastercam-certified trainers at the local Mastercam reseller. He was almost instantly overwhelmed by all of the software’s capabilities. Today, if a router operator seems like a good candidate to become a programmer, Howell will work with him over time to familiarize the candidate with all of the software’s basic capabilities. He said, “Once a guy knows the basics, we send him to formal training. Now he’s more comfortable and can ask a lot of questions. It’s easy to go to class and he can learn a lot.”
Projects start in Midcoast Aviation’s engineering department and are then transferred to the CNC department in the form of a SolidWorks CAD model. These are imported into Mastercam without the need of further modification. This procedure is fast and insures that none of the design intent is sacrificed in transition. Sometimes engineering of aircraft cabinetry is outsourced. In this case the CAD models come in as CATIA or other parasolids files. The CAM software is versatile enough to deal with any of these without resorting to special translators.
Howell said, “We do quite a bit of 5-axis stuff, for example, some of the wildest looking tools and molds you could imagine. These are for our composite shop where they make components out of molded fiberglass. To insure safe, efficient and complete 5-axis cutting, Midcoast uses the Mastercam’s backplot and verify features on a daily basis. Other features Howell finds particularly useful: nesting, to get as many parts as possible out of a given sheet of material, and integrated CAD, for designing fixtures and tooling within Mastercam.
In spite of work coming in from every possible direction, Midcoast Aviation’s CAD System continues to get nearly 100% utilization out of its cutting equipment. That won’t be changing any time soon. |