Camtek Pacific develops Expert CAD/CAM applications for SDS Digger Tools
SDS Digger Tools is providing the mining industry with tools and services for mineral exploration and production drilling. Its innovative approach made the company the real authority in the field.
With supply subdivisions in Canada, Africa, Indonesia, SDS Digger Tools is under constant pressure to increase a production volume and decrease delivery time.
The drilling heads and hydraulic hammers manufactured by SDS Digger Tools are modern equipment. They are manufactured from hard materials, require high precision, have wide range of functional and size variations and involve multi axis machining.
All eight machining centres in a company are equipped with rotary and tilting tables to provide 4 and 5 axis machining.
Camtek Pacific was created with the purpose to provide Australian NC/CNC manufacturing community with specialised Expert CAD/CAM applications.
Joined now with Specialised Technical Services, involved in supply in Australia and New Zealand of CAD/CAM software and services, STS-Camtek set up one stop CAD/CAM shop providing the whole range of CAD/CAM products and services from universal CAD/CAM software and up to customised Expert CAD/CAM.
SDS Digger Tools has well structured and documented CAD drawings and machining methods covering cutting drilling heads, drilling bits and specialised drilling equipment.
When David Miller took responsibility for running and support of a big park of company’s NC/CNC machines he put as his first and immediate goal to increase efficiency of machinery usage and decrease machines’ down time.
David Miller knew about Expert CAD/CAM applications developed by Camtek Pacific and he approached Camtek Pacific with the request to develop SDS Expert CAD/CAM system.
The system had to provide automatic generation of NC/CNC programs direct from CAD drawings and in strict accordance with the company’s proven machining methods.
After studying and discussing the project specifications Camtek Pacific agreed to undertake development of the system. The programming and setting up time for an average drill bit, using SDS parametric features, had to be decreased by from 50% to 90% in comparison with the usually required up to 3 days using the manual NC programming, testing on the machine tools and editing.
To assure the customer Camtek Pacific included into the proposition the special condition that if within 6 months testing period productivity gains fail expectations or/and the system is not working to SDS satisfaction Camtek Pacific returns all money paid for development of the system.
Says Mark Goldfeld, Camtek Pacific managing director: “With our experience in development of specialised Expert CAD/CAM Applications and perfectly structured and documented Know-How of SDS Digger Tools we were confident in providing the company with reliable and efficient solutions. Our case with SDS Digger Tools has confirmed that once more.”
The drilling head
- Programming time 2 minutes
- Number of cutters used 4
- Number of cutting operations 8
- 5 axis machining
- Machining time 30.8 minutes
The program generated direct from DWG CAD file. Colour and Layer attributes are used to simplify filtering of geometry and extraction of required information.
The head is cut from hard cutting materials and as cutting time is critical all cutting operations are customised to eliminate air cutting. For example, the deep drilling operation allows defining parts of the holes already open to pass them with increased feed. The plunging moves are automatically adjusted to go with feed only during metal cutting.
The drilling bit
- Programming time 3.5 minutes
- Number of cutters used 4
- Number of cutting operations 4
- 5 axis machining
- Machining time 68.4 minutes
The CAD drawing has a table of required compact bit holes with their types and locations. Expert software analyses the table and all compact types and positions are retrieved.
The data base management system of Expert is used to store compacts’ parameters and machining data. It has been expanded by the company personnel as it was required. To minimise the setting up time the setting of coordinate position of the part on 5 axis table by one probe touch was developed and implemented.
Says David Miller: “The developed and installed system and its support are good. All necessary modifications and enhancements are done accordingly to our requirements within 24-48 hours using telephone, fax and e-mail.”
Camtek Pacific continues close collaboration with SDS Digger Tools. It provided the company with the software for seamless transition of its CAM data from imperial to metric unit system.
The template based turning application provided generation of NC/CNC turning programs direct from the available CAD data. In a pipe line is transfer of company’s CAD and CAM from 2D drawings to solid models of its product range.
STS-Camtek is covering all company’s CAM requirements and is targeting Australian manufacturing companies ready to step up their machining efficiency by usage of specialised Expert CAD/CAM applications.
31-Mar-2008