Tough-to-produce plastic parts used to be something extremely difficult for programmer David Eno at Auburn Vacuum Forming Co in Auburn, NY. But, they found a way to make them more easily, while giving them a comfort zone for any part that comes through their doors.
Auburn manufacturers vacuum or pressure-formed plastic parts for the industrial, medical, and transportation markets. These custom made parts normally involve secondary CNC machining and further value-added assembly work. Their forty person staff is supported in these efforts with in-house services including CAD, pattern, mold, and fixture construction.
Auburn’s pattern shop has the capability to produce tools using traditional pattern making equipment coupled with computer-assisted design and machining. Fixtures and CNC programs are developed in-house to ensure tight control over the manufacturing process. 3 and 5-axis CNC machines are used extensively for consistent and productive part processing. They are able to import and export files, to rapidly develop CNC toolpaths, and to assist customers with part design and development.
A problem the company had to solve was how to trim small or large parts from thermoformed-plastic sheets quickly and accurately, and produce molded parts productively. Molds and plastic formed parts could be as small as 2” by 3” or up to 10’ in length. An average molded thermoformed part is 5’ square using up to 1/2”-thick plastic sheet.
Auburn processes production orders from those that are small (less than 50 pieces) to those in the thousands of parts, and also designs and produces prototypes. To be able to trim out these large thermoformed parts, the company has been using Mastercam since 1993. Eno has been using Mastercam since 1987. Today, they are using Mastercam’s new Multiaxis and Solid Modeling capabilities to generate toolpaths and surfaces for their CNC trimming machine and metal cutting milling machines. Eno remarked, “We’re using Mastercam to generate toolpaths for aluminum molds and to trim the parts that they produce. We have the ability to take our customers’ supplied geometry and import it into Mastercam. Features such as openings, holes, square holes, trimmed edges, all of these would be handled by the 5-axis trimming station with code and toolpaths generated by Mastercam.”
Surfacing with Mastercam is “very easy,” remarked Eno. “You can easily control the router position, the wrist-arm position with a vector, and lock it into position without generating a lot of unnecessary code. Mastercam is very intuitive and very reliable. Once you generate a toolpath and you see it on-screen, you know that it’s an accurate representation of what your CNC machine is going to do when the CNC program is executed.”
Eno added, “On average, our programs take us about an hour to do, and at times less than 10 minutes. However, we couldn’t do it on the machine’s CNC controller. It would be very difficult, to just about impossible to program our parts that way. Also with Mastercam, it allows us to do a job more than one way. It gives us a great comfort level with whatever part comes through the door to produce, because we know that Mastercam can handle it.” |