A bit of a free spirit, Graney left his father’s business (J.G. Machine, Woburn, MA) in 1999 to start his own job shop. Why? Because, said Graney, “I like doing things my own way.” He started out with some good used equipment, and he has been trading up regularly.
He knew that flexible, full-featured CAD software would be essential to meet the expectations of high-tech customers in Massachusetts and nearby southern New Hampshire. So he bought a Mastercam CAD/CAM software license (CNC Software, Tolland, CT) and has upgraded it continually ever since.
Graney reasoned that when you have customers who are going to pay you well, but only to make one or two items, you have to be able to do the programming quickly and make the part right the first time. “With some software, you might start out making two parts so you can get one good one, because of glitches in the software. We don’t worry about that because we use Mastercam’s verification to make sure we have removed all of the material, and we use the backplot feature to eliminate potential tool crashes.”
When his copy of Mastercam X2 arrived on his virtual desktop, he was extremely impressed by the extensive collection of high speed toolpaths and the ability to automatically generate a comprehensive set of ultra efficient toolpaths from a surface model. He got to put both of these to use in short order.
In March of 2006, Santa Cruz Bicycles, a highly regarded trail bike manufacturer in Santa Cruz, California, was in need of a job shop that could manufacture components for one of its models almost overnight. Graney said he could do it, but when he got the drawings, he was astonished by what he saw.
“These are the craziest bicycles with all sorts of sculptured parts. The ones they wanted me to make did not have a flat or parallel surface anywhere. I had never seen anything like it.
“There was no way I could have done this in previous versions of any CAM software package I had used in the past,” he noted. “Mastercam seemed to have the tools I needed to do the job. So I just went ahead and learned to use them as I was programming the customer’s part. Fortunately, it worked.”
In programming this one unique part, Graney learned how to adapt many of the toolpaths he uses today in his manufacturing business. These include:
High speed area clearance
Rest roughing
High speed horizontal
High speed scallop
High speed pencil
One of the things that helped Graney get a firm virtual grip on this elusive sculptured part was using the CAD program’s WCS (Work Coordinate System) feature. The WCS feature allows the user to establish a Work Coordinate System that is oriented to the top of the part itself rather than the typical designer’s coordinate system, which is oriented to the component’s position in the entire assembly.
It took Graney a little over a day to construct the part model in Mastercam and generate the toolpaths for manufacturing it. It really helped that the parts were mostly mirror images with only slight differences in geometry. To make the second part, he only had to duplicate the first, flip it, and make a few modifications.
After his early eye-opening experience with the high speed machining toolpaths, Graney began to look for opportunities to take advantage of them wherever he could. Now he uses them all the time, whether he is manufacturing two pieces or several hundred. Mastercam has become an integral part of his strategy for squeezing more costs out of his manufacturing processes. |