December 24, 2007

WorkNC used by winners of Mori Seiki’s Cutting Dream Contest

The Gold prize in the Die and mold machining / Mold machining section of Mori Seiki’s Cutting Dream Contest Awards 2007 was won by the Kawanami Ironworks Inc. Based in Kyoto, Japan, the company machined a jacket from aluminum.

The engineers from Kawanami Iron Works used WorkNC CAM/CAD software from Sescoi to program the toolpath, which produced the winning entry on a machining center.

Working from a 3D CAD model, the design for the jacket was imported into WorkNC. The engineer responsible at Kawanami Ironworks explained the process. “The model was entirely made up of free form surfaces, so the most difficult task was planning the sequence of operations and positioning the job datum.” The ultimate aim was to produce a finished product which properly represented the look and feel of the jacket. He continued, “The majority of the part was cut with WorkNC’s machining between two curves strategy. We found that this gave the best result for expressing the softness of the fabric.” Kawanami Ironworks’ engineers also used many of the other finishing toolpaths in WorkNC, these enabled them to pick out the fine detail and access confined areas without tool or holder collisions.

The engineers were impressed with the ease of use and data importation capabilities of WorkNC. “The software recognized the complex CAD data without any problems. We also found the system very easy to learn and implement with many toolpaths to choose from, making it flexible and very reliable. Furthermore, despite the complexity of the jacket, calculation times were extremely fast.”

This was the fourth Mori Seiki Cutting Dream Contest and the standard of the entries was very high. Winning the coveted Gold prize is a true reflection of the skills of the engineers at Kawanami Ironworks, and the technology available in WorkNC which contributed to their success.