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Product category: CAM and software for sheetmetal, punching, profiling, EDM, etc
News Release from: Delcam | Subject: PowerMILL CAM system - laser profiling
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial Team on 18 January 2007

CAM software improves laser cutting
efficiency

Metal cutting machine CAM software is is used to program a multi-axis laser to cut the tubing for bicycle frames and so shorten time to market.

Delcam's PowerMILL CAM system has played key role in helping TREK, the world's premier bike designers and manufacturers, to stay ahead of its competitors with increased design flexibility, improved quality and shorter time to market TREK is best known as the supplier of bikes to seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong

The Delcam software is used to program a multi-axis laser to cut the tubing for bicycle frames at the Waterloo, Milwarkee, headquarters and frame manufacturing plant of the company.

TREK manufacturing engineers face two main challenges.

First, they must keep up with design changes; in 2005, 13 new models were designed and produced in titanium, steel or aluminium, with an average of seven different sizes of each.

Second, they must manufacture about 300 frames each day, while assuring a high quality fabrication and finish.

"When I first started here, we had round, oval and a few arrow-shaped tubes," said Dean Garner, TREK manufacturing engineer, weld/frame build.

"The development of the laser cutting programming started several years ago with round tube, which was fairly simple to program.

Now, with changing surface shapes, without a 5-axis program, we would be writing the laser code one line at a time which would take about a day per tube compared to about 10 minutes with PowerMILL." Most of the tool path calculations which TREK engineers would have had to do manually, PowerMILL now does automatically.

"All we have to do is set up the frame model in our desktop computer so PowerMILL can find the ends of the spline tube and generate a tool path for the laser," Garner said.

"Once the tool paths are created, we can post that code to an automated post processor for the laser added by our Delcam reseller, Programming Plus.

This shows how the laser will respond to what we have just done.

If we like it, we can run that chunk of code," Garner explained.

"With PowerMILL, we are getting a much tighter fit, piece to piece, and minimal gaps, which means we can hold our overall frame geometry much better.

With our previous CAM techniques, gaps between parts before welding could have been 1mm or more.

Today, it is rare to see a gap greater than 0.1mm," Garner said.

The closer tolerances make it easier and less time-consuming to put the frame together.

PowerMILL is a big help while TREK is in the validation stage and proving out a bike concept.

"We sometimes may have four or five iterations before we are ready for production so we have to go back and re-program our laser code.

However, because we are holding tighter tolerances, the number of iterations is being reduced, resulting in faster time to market," Garner claimed.

"PowerMILL has made it possible for TREK to design some exciting, aerodynamic shapes into the bike frames and then produce them quickly." Other applications are on the horizon at the innovative company.

"We have worked out other potential uses for PowerMILL, such as making die sets for producing the carbon frames, which saves us up to US$30,000 each," Garner said. Request a free brochure from Delcam ...

"Now we can do them in-house, we also get better results.".

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