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Product category: Software, off-line programming, CAM, for metal cutting machine tools
News Release from: Delcam | Subject: CADCAM software at Oscor Inc
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial Team on 18 January 2008

CAD/CAM reduces products' time to market

In prototyping and producing medical components, a company said that its CAD/CAM software enables it to often go from prototype to production in a matter of days, producing tooling in-house.

The rapid introduction of its minute medical components is owed by the Oscor company to Delcam's CADCAM software Oscor's chief of manufacturing engineering, Ed Smith, said: "We do a lot of R and D and constantly come up with new products

We often must be able to go from prototype to production in a matter of days.

One of the ways we are able to do this is to produce all our tooling in-house.

This gives us control over the development and helps us achieve very fast turnaround on every tool".

Oscor designs, develops, manufactures and markets a range of highly-specialised lead systems for pacemakers and a variety of other medical applications.

Most are high-volume, high-accuracy components produced in the range of 100,000 parts'month.

Typical tolerances are 0.0002in.

Oscor operates a state-of-the-art machine shop, which includes high-speed CNC vertical milling machines and a Roku Roku turning centre served by a robotic loading system.

There are four high-speed milling machines, two Mori Seiki machines for metalcutting and two others for machining graphite electrodes.

All can run at 20,000 rev/min.

The CNC milling machines use very small cutters.

The smallest is a 0.005in diameter ball cutter for milling the electrodes.

The company also runs six Star Swiss-turn automatic lathes.

Smith introduced Delcam CADCAM software into Oscor.

He said: "We now use PowerSHAPE and PowerMILL for our mills and PartMaker for our Swiss-turn machines.

Our Mitsubishi wire EDMs are run by Partmaker Wire.

I've always liked Delcam because it is not a limited product, it has a lot of flexibility for the user built into it".

Delcam told manufacturingtalk.com that Oscor uses PowerSHAPE, to analyse its mould models for duplicated or missing surfaces, interactively inspect draft angles, and see hard-to-mould areas for the tiny leads.

Smith said that 90% of the parts Oscor makes can be created with solid modelling.

Smith added: "For the other 10%, we found that the surface modelling flexibility of PowerSHAPE has been very helpful".

Smith said: "PowerMILL even lets us write our own software code to automate our work.

We first create a Visual Basic program and link it back into PowerMILL.

For example, this ability has allowed us to automate the robotic handling of electrodes and tell the machine how many, and what kind of, electrodes we want it to produce.

Little things like that add up to a lot of time saved", PowerMILL's range of high-speed machining techniques help to assure rapid delivery of high-quality mould tools and components for Oscor.

According to Smith, that ability is a big reason customers come to his company.

"We can do these micro-moulds faster that most shops could ever hope to," he claimed. Request a free brochure from Delcam ...

"Our specialty is the quick prototype-to-production work in the 30,000 parts per month range and that is where the Delcam software really helps us to be responsive to our customers.".

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