Speed is of the essence - Yonetani Die & Mold does it with WorkNC

The Yonetani Die & Mold Co, Niigata Prefecture, Japan has been using Sescoi’s WorkNC CADCAM software since 1995. It specializes in the manufacture of casting dies for automotive engines and transmissions for customers that include Toyota, Nissan and Mazda, and prides itself on achieving the shortest possible lead times for its dies and molds by using the most up to date technology. In the design phase, it uses software tools to analyze fluidity, solidification, heat conduction, thermal stress, strength, and particle flow. The company verifies tool performance through inhouse trials, continually honing its skills and optimizing its use of analysis software to produce precision molds and dies extremely quickly.

<< Completion of the tool library has produced some major time reductions. Integrating this with WorkNC’s toolpaths ensures consistent and automatic manufacturing methods which are the same for every programmer, resulting in major reductions in cost. >>
Tsuyoshi Yonetani, CEO & President, Yonetani Die & Mold Co., Japan.

CEO and President, Tsuyoshi Yonetani, stresses his company’s aim of maintaining its leadership position in the market. “Our motto is ‘Speedy Manufacturing’. We are constantly looking at ways of improving our performance and automating our processes.” WorkNC has played a key role in this strategy since 1995, which saw the introduction of four seats of the CADCAM software. Further seats were added, all with the aim of increasing the speed of production, and by 2008 all the company’s CNC programs were being created using WorkNC.

Yonetani Die & Mold constantly strives to automate its processes and has built up a tool library and a set of standard WorkNC toolpaths to cover the majority of its work. Because of the complexity of some of its molds, toolpaths do have to be modified to cope with individual variations, but cutterpath standardization for most of its work has resulted in much faster programming. Tsuyoshi Yonetani says, “Completion of the tool library has produced some major time reductions. Integrating this with WorkNC’s toolpaths ensures consistent and automatic manufacturing methods which are the same for every programmer, resulting in major reductions in cost. We found that we could create set up documentation and standard programs in half the time it previously took.”

The company added WorkNC’s NCspeed module to its system to optimize toolpaths. The software analyses the NC code and checks for favorable cutting conditions and the volume of material being removed. Where conditions are good, feedrates are increased while, for difficult or heavy cutting conditions, they are reduced, greatly increasing tool life. Machining times are also shortened by increasing the average cutting speed. Tsuyoshi Yonetani adds, “By using NCspeed in parallel with WorkNC we have been able to achieve significant improvements in quality and efficiency. The software ensures that our cutterpaths are safe and reliable, leading to much longer tool life.”

Now that all the CAM operators exclusively use WorkNC, Yonetani Die & Mold can produce its CNC programs much faster. Tsuyoshi Yonetani says, “Because we have standardized our manufacturing methods as much as possible we have to make very few changes to our WorkNC programs for each new job. As a result, around 30% of the time we spend on CAM related activities is spent on tailoring cutting strategies. We take great care to get these right first time before calculating the toolpaths.”

Yonetani Die & Mold works in close collaboration with Sescoi to further its aims of speedy manufacture. It has specific requirements for high speed machining methodology. Furthermore, it is looking forward to the 2.5-axis automated programming which is currently under development at Sescoi. It is also examining the possibility of implementing 5-axis machining.

Tsuyoshi Yonetani believes that, with die and mold manufacture as its core activity, his company will be able to broaden its scope through the machining of specialist aerospace, automotive, and general mechanical parts. “We need to be constantly forging ahead with new developments, taking the long term view, to meet competitive challenges. In the final analysis we believe that speed is most important for added value in dies and molds. If, for example, our competitors in some other countries can deliver products at half the price, we need be able to offer them 60% quicker”.