Terray Corporation – A Better Idea Creates a Business

The Challenge

Desjardins started Terray Corporation in Arnprior, Canada to build products for the medical industry. Often these products use cold-forming that the company specializes in. This requires forging presses and the ability to produce forging dies. To build these dies requires software programs for surfacing, five-axis work, and verification of the CNC program.

Mastercam Lathe and Mill for surfacing and 5-axis capabilities

• Terray depends on Mastercam to plot toolpaths for surfacing complex countours and for performing intricate, 5-axis machining.
• Mastercam’s most important features are “specifically, the things I would not want to do by hand, very fine tolerances and 3D surfacing,” says Programmer Randy Trebuth. “We’re using Mastercam for dies – forming, forging, stamping, and cutting ones.”
• Terray uses Mastercam to build work-holding fixtures, complex 3D form fixtures, and to build assemblies.
• For surfacing, Mastercam drives the 4th and 5th-axis modules on their machining centers. “Without the sofware’s capability, we’d be doing it the old school way. We’d have to cut the part as close as you can by sight, then start using the old art forms, such as hand polishing and sanding to get the part within tolerance.”
• Mastercam’s toolpath verification is used quite a bit by Terray. They try to set up the program so that it simulates the machining environment. Verification is used to see if any toolpath problems exist.

The Terray Corporation began manufacturing rod benders for stainless steel rods that are contoured to fit the human spine and wired in place. Later, the company graduated to implantable medical devices. “The group we were working with, the surgeons and researchers, wanted to make plates for the spine to allow a bone to heal. So, we started making them and other medical products. We make a bone plate that is affixed to the anterior aspect of the spine in order to correct it after a tumor has been removed or after a burst fracture.”

Today Terray Corp. has 40 employees in a 27,000 sq. ft. building that houses 20 CNC machines, consisting of lathes and vertical milling machines with 3-, 4- and 5-axes.

Desjardins remarks that Terray has engineers and designers who use CAD software, along with programmers, production, and setup personnel who use CAM software. “They verify what’s coming from engineering using Mastercam to recreate a model and discuss the differences between CAD and CAM before we start machining something,” he says. Terray performs five-axis machining solely with Mastercam.

Desjardins adds, “I think Mastercam is easy enough to use, and it offers accurate translations between CAD and CAM for machining. For trauma and fracture fixation components, we’re trying to make them smaller and thinner all the time, but robust enough to endure over time. So, we generally push the requirements for the metal alloy manufacturers to produce a very exacting piece of steel for us. We then prototype our components using rapid prototyping, or through machining, and verify each component and check it for fit. Next, we would design tools and components to assist with the application of the implant. It’s very likely the doctors would have to make some changes to the implant. Then we would do mechanical testing to verify it for fatigue life and so on. If the implant passes this testing, then it’s ready for use. Otherwise, it has to go in for redesign and modifications.”

Most of these components are stainless steel. But Terray also works in titanium, cobalt, and chrome-alloy steels. The smallest of these metal parts is about 1/8-inch wide by ½-inch long at 0.050-inch thick. The largest components are roughly 20 to 25 inches long, and, at their widest, 2-1/2 inches with varying thicknesses from between 0.200 to about 3/8-inch.

Terray offers their bone plates in a range of sizes. A bone plate for a finger, for instance, has one design, but comes in about five or six sizes. A device for a leg could have one design and 12 sizes. For stock, Terray produces from one to 200 components at a time.The company also makes the screws that attach the plate to the bone.

After 15 years of Mastercam, Desjardins has looked at other software and says, “We’ve received demo copies, and we’ve looked at other products. They have their advantages and disadvantages, but we’ve always come back to Mastercam. We’ve stayed with it. In fact, we are using Mastercam to create complex surfaces that we really can’t do any other way.”

Trebuth adds, “I really like the quality of surfaces that we can get from the software. The parts coming out of the machine can be just astounding if you want to put a lot of work into tolerancing them. I wouldn’t be plotting complex 3D forms by hand with a calculator, that’s for sure. So, without Mastercam I wouldn’t be doing surfaces. We surface complete components using Mastercam’s 3D capabilities, not so much an implant, but a tool, or prototype.”

With the medical community’s ever-changing needs, Mastercam helps Terray keep pace. As a result, Mastercam helps heal people.