Click on the advert above to visit the company web site

Product category: Software, off-line programming, CAM, for metal cutting machine tools
News Release from: Delcam | Subject: PowerMILL CAM CNC machining software
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial Team on 11 October 2006

CAM doubles benefits for Australian
toolmaker

Benefits brought in toolmaking and engineering businesses by powerful CAM software has enabled a tooling and engineering firm to become one of Australia's most innovative.

Australian company Nepean Engineering has seen benefits in both its toolmaking and engineering businesses since it adopted Delcam's PowerMILL CAM software Established over 30 years ago, the Delcam software has helped privately-owned Nepean to become one of Australia's leading and most innovative tooling and engineering specialists

The company employs 240 people at its Narellan facility in New South Wales, where its operations include medium to heavy fabrication, structural steel and sheet metal fabrication, machining, and tool- and mouldmaking, along with design and construction of special purpose machinery.

The type of work handled ranges from small jobs to million dollar contracts.

The company is involved in a number of diverse areas, including the medical, scientific, aerospace and automotive industries, plastic injection moulding, silicon moulding and marine technology.

The manufacturing operations are supported by extensive design facilities through to shot blasting and powder coating.

"PowerMILL has brought us some real benefits," said Karl Zoeller, toolroom supervisor at Nepean.

"We are achieving better results and considerable savings in time.

At the end of the day, time is money," He explained: "On one particular job, a multi-cavity tool, using the Delcam software saved us over 200 man-hours.

Our problem was that previously we'd have a member of staff sitting in the office doing all the design work, generating the cutter parts etc etc and it wasn't really working," remembered Zoeller.

"We looked at a number of options and, as we had heard of Delcam and the local reseller Camplex, we met to investigate PowerMILL.

The first job we programmed was an eight-cavity injection mould.

All the parts were solid models and we generated all the cutter parts from them.

It was a fairly intensive job to learn on but we got through it without any dramas at all and could see benefits from the software instantly." Zoeller said: "I rough machined the tool and sent it to heat treatment.

Then, I completed some of the finishing operations on one machine and other components on our high speed machine.

It all worked.

We achieved very close tolerances with this job, plus all the operators liked PowerMILL and found it easy to use." Subsequent to this first success, Nepean has added extra seats of the software.

"We're now using PowerMILL in our general engineering applications, especially for defence-orientated parts, which involve a lot of weird shapes being machined out of solid material," said Zoeller.

"It's just so easy for us to put the designs into PowerMILL and away we go. Request a free brochure from Delcam ...

Whether we use PowerMILL for general engineering or for toolmaking at the high end, it works really well.".

• Delcam: contact details and other news
• Email this article to a colleague
• Register for the free Manufacturingtalk email newsletter
• Manufacturingtalk Home Page

Search the Pro-Talk network of sites