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• Shop-floor machining with Delcam’s PowerMILL

Weber Manufacturing Ltd., Midland, Ontario, Canada, uses Delcam’s PowerMILL on the shop floor to produce injection, compression, transfer and RIM moulds for a wide range of applications in the automotive, aerospace and consumer products industries.  The company is best known for its proprietary Nickel Vapour Deposition (NVD) technology through which it manufactures nickel shell moulds.  These offer substantial cost savings in multiple mould applications, provide high corrosion resistance and enable quick deliveries. 

NVD moulds are formed over machined mandrels that permit rapid production of multiple moulds without repetitive machining.  The one-off nature of the mandrels magnifies the requirement for fast and reliable CAM programming.

Because PowerMILL combines ease of use with solid reliability, Weber’s skilled machinists use it to produce their three-axis programs on the shop floor.  "Who better than the machinists to know how they want to machine?” asks Rolf Paudler, Machining Supervisor at Weber.  "Once they learn the software, they can make the programs as they want them, rather than trying to explain to someone in the office what they would like to do.  We have skilled machinists on every machine so we don’t need thirty programmers.”

"You want to make sure you don’t have your 3-D model being changed by people on the shop floor,” said Mr. Paudler.  "PowerMILL is strictly a CAM package.  The model is locked, so you can’t delete or modify anything.”

"It’s easier to use for somebody on the machine because you cannot manipulate the model,” he added.  "All you have is the tools to machine it.  You don’t have access to the tools for design and editing.”

"PowerMILL is a very reliable, stable program for three-axis machining,” confirmed Mr. Paudler.  "It does a good job on everything we throw at it.”

04 April 2006