Edgecam solves bottleneck for high speed machining at Muscroft

Sheffield precision toolmaker J Muscroft Engineering has resolved its CNC programming bottleneck, increased its business and now offers customers faster turnaround on manufacture of forging dies. It did so by investing in a two high speed, purpose-built hard metal machining capability, and Pathtrace’s EdgeCAM, CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) system. Muscroft says it is now able to generate reliable program data fast, and, as its dies can now be machined directly from pre-hardened materials, lead times are shorter and the machine shop is operating round the clock. Technical director Neil Griffiths says investing in the high speed machining centres meant being able to process hardened materials up to HRC 65, “which has attracted quite a lot of interest from local companies.” However, this led to an increase in the firm’s part programming workload, “which created a bottleneck situation forcing us to look for a more up-to-date system.” Griffiths says: “We looked at a number of different programming systems, beginning with a visit to MACH 2000 with follow up demonstrations at our factory. Pathtrace performed a very good demonstration and the capabilities of the system, as a whole, were impressive.” Muscroft installed EdgeCAM Mould and the Advanced Surface Machining module that take data from paper drawings and its clients’ CAD files. Says Griffiths: “The big advantage of using EdgeCAM is the combination of rapid program preparation with the added ability to check that the cavity to be machined is the one we originally set out to program. That capability gives us the confidence to commit to ‘lights-out’ machining of die cavities which has made a huge difference to our productivity and overhead recovery. And he adds: “One important feature to us is how accurately EdgeCAM will predict cycle time. This allows us to organise ourselves because program run time for these parts can often be between eight and 14 hours, which makes them an ideal overnight or a weekend job. In fact, it’s usually the case that we prepare the program and set the job up during the day, then follow on with the machining. “The machines are equipped with monitoring and modems which enables alarm generation if anything goes wrong, and our programmer can put in a telephone call at any time to determine how far through the process the program has run.” Griffiths concludes: “EdgeCAM is now an integral part of our die manufacturing process. The system is set up to automate certain areas of the programming process, such as our preferences for tooling and machining strategy. Likewise, we’ve been able to optimise the post processors for our machine control systems using EdgeCAM’s Code Wizard. “As well as manufacturing new dies, we do a lot of re-cutting and the availability of the archived programs though EdgeCAM makes this a very straightforward exercise. Even though some programs are quite lengthy, the system is able to generate the toolpaths very quickly and with EdgeCAM DNC links to the machine controls, program transfer is also fast.”