Late in 2005, Pacific Woodworking, a well-respected architectural millwork firm in Burnaby, British Columbia literally caught fire and burned to the ground. The owners could have cashed in their insurance policy and called it quits. Instead, they decided to rebuild from the ground up and take their highly regarded business to new heights.
Pacific Woodworking designed and built an efficient 22,000 sq. ft. open millwork plant with tight CNC integration. It purchased a new Recard 240 CNC router with Prisma 5-axis head and nesting bed. This system provides a 144” x 60” x 16” work envelope. It also also added a new Morbidelli Author 430 3-axis CNC router with a nesting table.
In September of 2006, Pacific Woodworking started doing a limited amount of millwork, creating toolpaths with Mastercam Router with solids modeling. Kirk Holland, CNC Operations Manager, immediately saw how the software would improve the company’s CAM programming productivity.
“The interface is the most obvious advantage in X2,” he said. “It’s the first thing you see and it completely changes how you draw compared to the old version. There is a ribbon bar that puts all the functions you most frequently use right on the desktop instead of buried under layers of menus.”
“The big thing for me is Mastercam’s live entities concept, which means you don’t have to get it right the first time. You can have a general idea of what you want to do, slap a line onto the screen and then determine where you want to place or visually change it. You don’t have to worry about mistakes because everything can be fixed afterwards. That is a real time saver.”
Holland said Pacific Woodworking had already established a reputation for fine 5-axis woodworking prior to the destruction of the plant. The 5-axis system was booked so solid with subcontract work that the company was having a hard time fitting in its own projects. The subcontracted jobs included a wide variety of intricate work: custom art objects, bowls, and even custom concrete decorative fireplaces. Now Holland believes that the new Mastercam X2 solids toolpaths will allow Pacific Woodworking to create decorative wooden objects that previously were not possible.
“We had a lot of people waiting, tapping their feet waiting for us to come back,” Holland said. “So there is a lot of work lined up. I’ve just started learning, and as projects come up, I’m really looking forward to sinking my teeth into it.”
Holland plans to aggressively push the boundaries of the company’s 5-axis machining capabilities. This will include learning how to draft more complex parts, taking fuller advantage of new toolpath options, and improving the company’s fixturing for single setup manufacturing. Becoming more proficient in these areas will allow Pacific Woodworking to produce more complex objects at even lower costs, enhancing a reputation that is already solid. |