Starting in sales, White worked for a start-up in Southern California until 2017. But after the company's founder failed to pay him for four months, he lost everything. White had to move his family—a wife and four kids—to Arizona to stay with his sister. He was working as a handyman and repairing air conditioners to make ends meet. He recalls the time as "nerve-wracking."

Nevertheless, he kept on learning more about machining from YouTube videos. White got his first machining order from Craigslist and filled that order in his garage using a Tormach milling machine he brought with him from California. That client is still with him today.

“We stayed with his sister for three weeks while our home was in escrow,” says White.

He then got more jobs, growing organically, and soon moved from his garage shop into a bigger shop space, and eventually growing into a business that employs two others and occupies 2,500 sq. ft. of manufacturing space with four machines.

Going from near-homeless to owning a shop that does close to a million dollars of business annually, in just over five years, took an interesting mix of strategies.

Trading Higher Production Costs for Time?

White first had to address a significant, if not the most significant, pain point of manufacturers who order parts from overseas facilities.

The model of off-shore manufacturing is based on trading time for lower production cost: you can get the goods more cheaply, but you have to wait for them.

American clients used to go overseas and order from manufacturers in China, Taiwan and the Philippines. It will take them six to eight weeks to get parts of unknown quality. If they find out the quality is not sufficiently high, they have to reorder and wait another eight weeks. Rinse and repeat.

But what if you trade higher production costs for time?

This is not an easy sell, and White's clients were also skeptical initially.

However, while China has long been the world's factory, it is predicted by the International Monetary Fund to run out of surplus, i.e., cheap, labor, between 2020 and 2025. In fact, it may have already been starting to feel the pinch as early as 2010. As a result, the wage costs in China's manufacturing sector nearly tripled between 2002 and 2009, and rose by   percent from 2009 to 2019 by the government’s own official estimate. In short, China's labor cost has increased by a factor of six from 2002 to 2019, so much so that it is twice as expensive as that of Mexico. Cost is also no longer the only determining factor. Other disadvantages of outsourcing to China include quality issues, counterfeit products, inconvenient inspection due to long distances and long wait times.

White's strategy on trading higher costs for time is based on his belief that "to succeed, you need to understand the technologies important to your clients." He understands that his clients require technologies that will help produce parts of high quality. So, he buys machining equipment that is as high quality as that used by overseas manufacturers. He also makes sure he uses the best and most up-to-date software: the SOLIDWORKS platform for design, and Autodesk Fusion 360 for programming.

So, when White produced high-quality parts on the same day without having his clients wait six to twelve weeks, they were delighted.

"I also try to reprogram the mindset of my clients," says White, "I tell them, if you use me, this is how I will help with your engineering department, your QC and your deadlines."

With his background as a machinist, White also provides free consulting on process improvement and "making the client's engineering department's job easier." As a result, "once my clients have gotten a taste of how high the quality is and how quickly they can get the delivery, they do not want to go back to waiting months."

White's clients stayed on; the increase in cost was no longer the central issue. They responded positively when White bought a mill-turn machine, which is even better than the machines used overseas and can make complex parts more quickly--though at a slightly higher cost. A client even ensured exclusivity and priority by paying for a machine designated for filling its orders in White's shop.

In the process, White has shifted the conversation from price to timeliness and quality.

The Importance of Timing

White's grit and resilience are remarkable and intentional or not, so was his timing. He started his business in 2017 when multiple factors worked in his favor. First, the reshoring movement, which started around 2010, was gaining momentum. In addition, the Tax Reform Act of 2017 lowered U.S. manufacturers' tax rates to 21 percent, lower than the worldwide average manufacturer's tax rate of 24 percent.

Moreover, there were the tariffs enacted during the Trump administration. The 301 China penalty tariffs on imports and the 232 tariffs on aluminum and steel have made imports more expensive, giving U.S. manufacturers a competitive edge in pricing. Furthermore, the many effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global supply chain have compressed the timeline for supply chain reorganization.

No wonder White's clients changed their minds—and they were not the only ones. According to the Kearney survey, in March 2021, 49 percent of 120 U.S. manufacturing executives agreed that the benefits of onshore production outweigh higher labor costs.

Doing What Others Don't Do

White also sees manufacturing differently from most machinists. "I never came from the manufacturing industry. I started in sales, where customer service is a big deal," White recalled. He had worked as a blackjack dealer, a car salesman and an auto wholesaler ("400 cars per month").

"I have lots of experience working with people, following up and closing deals," he says. He also has experience dealing with people overseas and people who are hard to negotiate with. An extrovert, White loves to learn about people and is much more comfortable dealing with people than many machine shop owners.

Providing good customer service is one of the reasons White offers free consulting, which is an effective way for him to secure larger orders and longer contracts. 

Once his clients have realized how nice it is to work with somebody who can make their lives easier, they stay on. Their working relationships have gotten so comfortable that now, deals are done via text messages and emails. White even acts as a middleman and helps clients find other reliable vendors and subcontractors. White has grown his business mostly by word of mouth and intends to continue doing so.

Conclusion

Going old-school as well as high-tech has worked out well for White. He places a greater emphasis on using the most up-to-date technology than many machine shops, takes customer service more seriously than many machinists and is a more knowledgeable machinist than many customer service people in manufacturing. All these attributes have placed him in a uniquely competitive position.

He also stresses the importance of being flexible. "You have to get with the times. Shops that don't want to change habits, get technology updates, get re-tooled or use software will not survive."

White also does parenting differently. His wife approached him about homeschooling their children, and initially he wasn’t in favor. However, as she presented data on how much time children spend in school, versus their actual time spent learning, there was a large gap due to class sizes and time spent maintaining order in the classroom setting. So, they chose to hire a teacher with a master’s degree in education who comes to their home twice a week and provides a fun and diverse learning environment with a tailored education for their two daughters. This approach allows them more time to pursue their own interests, just like when he was growing up and spending time in shop, woodworking and motocross. 

For example, White's daughter Saylor, who presented at the 3DEXPERIENCE Conference ("She can already do programming on SOLIDWORKS. How many 10-year-olds do you know that can do that?"), wants to become a commercial airline pilot. She is currently working on a letter to pitch the idea to the CEO of Southwest to create a scholarship for her to get flight education.  

Looks like strategizing runs in the family.

Buchli often finds he’s fighting a headwind from manufacturers who are dominated by design, as well as design software vendors. Both of these treat the manufacture of products as a thankless, trivial final step, with little for the manufacturing function to do because the product has been fully defined. Why not simply throw it over the wall and have the machine shop make it?

That does not work these days, says Buchli—for a variety of reasons.

There is a shortage of people in the manufacturing sector, for one thing. For another, manufacturing these days is anything but trivial; in fact, it’s downright complicated. You don’t just have a machinist with a Bridgeport [milling machine] anymore. You have 3D printing, 5-axis milling machines, EDM, custom manufacturing and robots. You need to know programming. A whole new skillset is needed for manufacturing today, and few people have it.

Born and raised in Nebraska, Buchli brings a "farmer's ingenuity” to a small manufacturing team centered in Dassault Systèmes’ North America headquarters in Waltham, Mass. He has been there for seven years.

What did you do before joining Dassault Systèmes?

I was a Dassault Systèmes customer using SOLIDWORKS, PDM, Simulation and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

What was your first job at Dassault Systèmes?

I spent the first five years in R&D helping take SOLIDWORKS into the mainstream.

Why do we have a shortage of people in manufacturing?

People don’t want to work in mundane jobs anymore. Think of cashiers at Walmart. Who wants to be a cashier? Nobody. So, Walmart puts in automated checkout, and that increased throughput. That’s happening all over.

Manufacturing also requires lots of mundane activity and repetition. You load in a part, then you take it out. Load it in, take it out. The manufacturing sector is suffering from a lack of people wanting to do this. Humans like to be higher-level thinkers. They don't want to be the person that only replaces the part every two minutes.

You couple that with the pandemic, and in the last couple of years, a lot of people stayed home. They had the chance to hit the pause button and rethink their lives. They were like, ‘we don't want to do that anymore.’ It was going to happen anyway, but the pandemic accelerated it. And now we have a problem. We’re in a world where we have to produce more than ever because people consume more than they ever have. But we don't have the people to make things.

How are we going to solve this problem? We can solve it through automation.

You’re saying that if you have a robotic job, you ought to be replaced by a robot, so you could move on to other, better jobs?

Yes. Companies don't want to remove people. What they want is to have people do what they're built to do, which is work in higher functioning jobs. Take the person loading a voting machine. They can train a robot to do that. They know what skills are needed and what has to happen. Have the robot do it, and they become the robot programmer.

You think of robots as not getting rid of people, but liberating them? But do you deny that there will be dislocation in the short term? Not everybody can be a robot programmer. Some people may not get other jobs.

Yes, it’s true. Not everybody gets to go along on the journey. But at the same time, if they're doing a job just for the sake of a job, even if they don't have the skillset to do the higher end [work], it isn't really helping them. They're in a job where they're not able to flourish. Everyone’s life is a journey, but a lot of time, people get stuck in one place because that was the only opportunity available at the time.

How does that relate to your journey?

I started out as a manufacturing engineer and did drafting and engineering and design patent stuff. All the time, I was thinking of continuous improvement and automation. There were a number of jobs that I got into where it was doing one thing every day in drafting and engineering, over and over and over, like a machine. It was CAD in the early days. I was making drawings. Lines, arcs, circles. They didn’t want to hear about your ideas for continuous improvement. That wasn’t a good fit for me.

You were essentially a robot? Your intellectual gifts were not being used. You liberated yourself?

Yes. Look at what happened in engineering. Parametric modeling came along and allowed drafters to become designers. We're seeing the same thing in manufacturing. The machine operator that just loads and unloads the same part every two minutes is no different than the drafter in 1999.

You propose freeing the mind. What else?

In an assembly line the work is repetitive, not ergonomic and a drain on the human body. You can get carpal tunnel or a bad back. Humans aren’t good at this, and it’s bad for them. We can take a look at that work. If it puts a human in a repetitive, bad situation, we can have automation do it. We owe it to that working human to solve their problem, because there is a long-term health risk.

Take painting an automobile. Automotive manufacturers used to have guys in the paint booth painting cars to go down the line. Now it’s all done with robots. Workers are not breathing in fumes and their health does not suffer in the long term. Even with all the PPE [person protective equipment], workers still come into contact with chemicals. That guy in the body shop that has been painting for 30 years. He’s not a healthy guy.

Stay tuned for more on manufacturing automation in Part 2 of our interview with Dassault Systèmes’ Michael Buchli.

I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I want to use 3DEXPERIENCE, but I’m just a little (or maybe a lot…) overwhelmed by the platform. Between the apps and the roles, the PLM backbone and the cloud UI, I have repeatedly found myself retreating to my comfort zone: SOLIDWORKS.

From one perspective, this is a testament to the power of SOLIDWORKS. Half my time in CAD is spent programming CNC machines and because of SOLIDWORKS CAM and CAMWorks I have been able to do everything I need to in the SOLIDWORKS desktop program. So far.

But I know my apprehension toward change has stunted my growth and could (if it hasn’t already) be the beginning of a skills gap between myself and my competition. Resolved not to become an “old dog” in the industry, I have been searching for the right entry into the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

I needed a role that delivered functionality that was undeniably better than what I had access to in SOLIDWORKS, and which was pertinent to my specific type of work.

In other words, I needed an awesome CAM experience.

And fairly recently, I discovered a role that has the potential to thrust me into the 3DEXPERIENCE platform permanently: NC Shop Floor Programmer.

The NC Shop Floor Programmer role includes the following apps:

The two apps pertinent to my interests were Shop Floor Machining and Wire EDM Machining. Armed with these apps, I could program advanced 3-axis milling machines (including 2.5-axis machines, of course) and both 2- and 4-axis wire EDM machines.

Quick note: NC Shop Floor Programmer is the entry-level role for machining in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Other apps powered by DELMIA NC technology can handle just about any machining task, including 9+ axis mill/turn machines and 6-axis robotic arms.

With 10 years of CAMWorks (and later SOLIDWORKS CAM) experience behind me, it is difficult to imagine using anything else. Programming parts is almost muscle memory at this point: Automatic Feature Recognition > Generate Operation Plan > Generate Toolpath and tweak from there. I can’t program parts in my sleep, but I would be lying if I said CAMWorks has never appeared in my dreams at night.

I was relieved to learn that the underlying technology that powers CAMWorks and SOLIDWORKS CAM is also utilized in the Shop Floor Machining app. An important difference, however, is that the 3DEXPERIENCE implementation presents the NC programmer with more buttons to push and levers to pull. More of the core technology is exposed to the user, giving more complete control over toolpaths and toolpath simulation.

This app was starting to sound pretty darn good.

Then I learned about Power’By and I knew I had no more excuses—I had to dive into 3DEXPERIENCE. The day had come.

If you aren’t familiar with Power’By, it is the technology Dassault Systèmes is developing to connect CATIA V5 and SOLIDWORKS with 3DEXPERIENCE. Long story short, it is what allows me to continue designing in SOLIDWORKS if I prefer, then pivot to 3DEXPERIENCE for CNC programming.

Someone with a more trailblazing attitude will use a platform tool such as Xshape and Xdesign to design parts and seamlessly transition over to Shop Floor Machining for NC programming. But I’m keeping one foot in the SOLIDWORKS pool for now, and Power’By makes that fairly simple. After saving to the platform and converting to a platform object, I end up with two files that are parametrically linked to one another: one for SOLIDWORKS and one for 3DEXPERIENCE. Cool.

From the start of the workflow, it is evident that NC Shop Floor Programmer is providing an elevated CNC programming experience. Unlike any other CAM tool that I have used, the 3DEXPERIENCE apps encourage users to program inside a full machine environment.

To clarify—because this is an important difference—the programming takes place within a context that includes the entirety of the machine tool (called a manufacturing cell). Anything that occupies space in the real world would occupy space within the virtual machine. The movement (or kinematics) of the machine are replicated exactly, as well.

Most programmers are accustomed to programming parts that seemingly float alone in space or interact with fixturing only in their immediate vicinity. More advanced users might export the program and validate the toolpaths in a third-party machine simulation software.

I don’t have to imagine how challenging it is to catch every mistake and prevent every crash with these options; I have had my fair share. When I learned that I would be programming within a full kinematic machine environment and validating true G-code toolpaths in real-time, I was shocked. This was an immediate delivery on the promise of increased functionality over SOLIDWORKS CAM and the like.

This does add a bit of work to the front-end of the workflow, however. In SOLIDWORKS CAM, I can leap into CNC programming only a few seconds after opening the file. There is almost no barrier to entry and with the help of technology such as automatic feature recognition (AFR) and knowledge-based machining (KBM), the overall workflow is very rapid.

This brings me to my primary complaint about NC Shop Floor Programmer:  it is more complicated than I’m accustomed to. The terminology is not intuitive and I have to click my mouse a lot more than I think I should.

As an example, here is the workflow for starting a program:

1. Create PPR context file (PPR = process product resource)
2. Create manufacturing cell
3. Insert manufacturing cell into PPR context file
4. Import product or NC assembly (new or existing part to machine)
5. Insert machine into PPR context file
6. Insert manufacturing product into PPR context file
7. Import tools into PPR context file
8. Define part to machine
9. Define the coordinate system
10. Program features using Automatic or Interactive feature creation
11. Generate toolpaths
12. Simulate toolpaths
13. Post G-code

It feels a little convoluted, especially coming from SOLIDWORKS. But I have no doubt that most of my apprehension is rooted in the novelty of the workflow more than anything else. It only feels heavy because my baseline is a tool that does not offer the same value that I’m getting in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform: associativity.

The associativity between objects within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is unprecedented. The cutting tools I use can be tracked to inventory and the features I program are linked to both engineering and manufacturing data elsewhere within the organization. Design changes made by other departments propagate through to my NC programs and the entire design-to-manufacture process is made as efficient as possible. Machine scheduling, cost estimating and resource allocation all become traceable and optimizable with the use of the PPR containers.

While I do have some grievances, overall, I believe CNC programming within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform offers immense value over more traditional CAM solutions. Even though the enterprise-level benefits are lost on my personal use case, the NC Shop Floor Programmer apps bring more toolpath-level control and significantly better toolpath validation to every user.

Improved versions of my favorite toolpath technologies, simpler file management, access to additional apps through the 3DEXPERIENCE roles… I am starting to regret waiting as long as I did to give the 3DEXPERIENCE platform the shot it deserves.

Learn more about 3DEXPERIENCE with the ebook Developing Better Products in the Cloud.

Engineered for Racing and Consumers

It would make sense for a speed shop to have a race team. There is a lot of crossover between the parts that are sold and the builds that the Speedway team races.

Jared Cote, a senior product engineer at Speedway Motors, explains, “Our market is street rod parts, muscle car parts, race car parts… Our customers build everything from a ‘32 Ford to sprint cars.”

Speedway Motor’s clientele is often building the same vehicles their race team uses. In fact, many of their new product concepts come from one of the many employees who also enjoy these automotive hobbies outside of work.

David Wallace, who is in charge of all the machine shops and manufacturing at Speedway Motors, describes his customer as anyone “from a normal guy building a car in his garage to somebody trying to build a show winning car.” It’s a pretty wide group of customers.

Because their customer-base is wide, the company has created a wide base of products and capabilities. “Speedway Racing Engines will build any type of motor you want,” Wallace explains. “We have a lot of CNC and manual equipment for metal cutting, and we also have welding fabrication, assembly, lasers and press brakes, different areas for MIG and TIG welding. We even build all our own fiberglass bodies in our fiberglass plant.”

Prototyping in the Field

From concept to production, Speedway Motors keeps most of their work in house. Their race team is also known as their verification team. Leveraging in-the-field prototyping helps the company’s small engineering team speed up their time to market.

“Our ideas for new products usually come from merchandising, ownership or another employee within the company,” Cote explains. “The engineering team will create the design. Dave [Wallace]’s team in the manufacturing area will build the prototypes. And then usually, the prototypes will go to the race team/verification team to test the parts. Then it’ll come back to us for a second round of prototypes or production prints to be made.”

The engineering team utilizes a number of different tools to develop their parts. Often, they’ll 3D scan a car body or other specific parts for fitment and reverse engineering. “We use Geomagic for the scan data and then we design everything in SOLIDWORKS,” Cote says.

Cote and his team also use a combination of SOLIDWORKS Simulation (for finite element analysis) and a CMM (coordinate measuring machine) to calculate the durability of parts.

“Recently, we were doing some testing on a torque arm and we were working on getting some CMM probe points. We also 3D scanned it,” Cote explains. “Then we installed the arm on a car with our race team. After we got done running a car with it, we went back and checked those points and rescanned to see if it had any signs of high stress or permanent deformation, to see if there’d been any kind of failure during testing.”

They’ve also used brittle-coating to test parts, which fractures in response to surface strain beneath it.

From Design to Production

Speedway Motors manufactures the parts that they sell. Their onsite facilities provide an array of CNC and fabrication capabilities, and are an essential element to their business. While their engineering team will send the production team production items, pre-production parts and prototypes to be manufactured, the shop also utilizes SOLIDWORKS for their own needs.

“We use a lot of assemblies,” says Wallace. “We make a lot of machined parts, sheet metal parts…simple parts, but then they all get put together in an assembly to make sure that we’ve got a working finished product. And we’ve been using CAMWorks inside SOLIDWORKS for a long time in the shop.”

However, designing products isn’t the only place they use CAD. In the fabrication and welding shop, Wallace’s team uses very specific welding tables. “They have a 50mm grid pattern, which allows us to tell Jared [Cote] and the rest of the engineering team what specific fixturing we may need to hold a part that might be made of five or six sub-components. We’ll do all the fixturing right out of engineering,” Wallace says.

“We’re a pretty small engineering group, so we do a lot of manufacturing engineering, as well as the design engineering,” Cote adds.

Wallace continues, “A lot of our fixturing we do in SOLIDWORKS, so when there’s a product change, we can control the fixturing change easily. It used to be that a lot of our fixtures were … we’d build a good part, but we’d hand-build the fixture off of that. If you change the part and your fixturing is by hand, it makes it really hard to replicate anything. By doing everything in CAD, if there’s a product change, we can both easily change the fixture and control the accuracy of the end product with the workholding.”

Having the ability to keep both engineering and manufacturing based in one software makes it easier for Speedway Motors to change things as time goes on and affords better control over their end product.

As Speedway Motors races towards faster time to market with new products, they are also looking to provide value for speed shop enthusiasts.

“We understand that our customers want to know how parts are built and fabricated because we have so many customers that are buying specialty parts,” Cote explains. “So, we offer a simplified engineering drawing on many of our top-selling house branded products. These drawings give the customer critical dimensions, which allows them to decide if the product will work for their application.”

Because most of their customers are building cars from the ground up, or close to it, they often need insight into the design and manufacturing specs of Speedway Motors products. “When you call the Customer Experience Team, we even have dedicated race car and street car techs on staff to answer customer questions that are specific to the type of vehicle they are building,” says Cote.

Speedway Motors takes pride in having such a tight connection to their customers and their passion; both Cote and Wallace (and their teams) work very closely together.

“Our engineers are always in the shop, so they are always seeing the new tools and machines that we’re using. We can show them the shop capabilities, and then they make improvements to their designs based on what we’re capable of by adding new tools,” Wallace says.

Internal collaboration and customer connection seem to be keeping Speedway Motors headed in the right direction. With a team that is engineering and manufacturing parts that they are as passionate about as their customers, they may actually deserve their claim as “America’s oldest speed shop.”

Learn more about SOLIDWORKS in automotive racing with the whitepaper Giaffone Racing: Expanding Into New Racing Markets with Topology Optimization Tools.

Of course, because so much is expected of these buggies, jeeps and off-road chariots, there are parts and components specially designed to hold up to the abuse. One of the most maltreated components are the front and rear differentials, as they are often the closest exposed component to the dirt trail, aside from the tires.

Enter Tim Fulton and his company, Alien Machine Worx.

While Alien Machine Worx operates as a job shop, cutting production parts on various CNC machine tools, they also make customized components for off-roaders and hearty differential covers.

“We do parts for lots of people in lots of different industries. We do some off-roads parts for other people, some medical stuff for other people, we do some aftermarket parts for certain companies, and we make our own differential covers and shifter knobs,” explains Fulton.

He has had an interest in off-roading since he was just a kid. There are rumors that he started off-roading at 16 years-old with a 1970 Chevelle, but his official start was when he got his first Toyota truck at 17. The sport has long been his passion, but three years ago it also took hold of his career.

Lots of Engineering in a Simple Component

Differential covers, or diff covers, are not complicated parts. The only purpose they serve is to protect the precious gear mechanisms inside the differential, and OEMs often make simple versions out of sheet metal.

When you’re off-roading, sheet metal doesn’t hold up well to various sized rocks and debris. “OEM diff covers get holes in them pretty easily. If you roll over a rock it can get a hole punched in the side,” Fulton says. “The worst part about damaging a diff cover is that if you don’t have somebody behind you, you don’t even know you have a hole in there. You could still drive 100 miles; it’ll just go dry. Then you’ll burn up your whole differential before you even realize you put a hole in the cover. It’s a peace of mind thing when you’re doing off-roading.”

Alien Machine Worx diff covers are ¼” thick and have built-in ribs, called rock sliders, that not only add thickness but also provide deflection for the cover. There is a lot of design effort that goes into these diff covers, including stress testing and simulations in SOLIDWORKS.

“We’ve even taken them out and shot at them, and they haven’t cracked,” he explains. “The biggest thing is protection. People will spend X amount of dollars setting their gears up and all this stuff is inside the differential, and then they put a cheap cover. Then all of a sudden, you smash that whole gear set when you run into something.”

Alien Machine Worx also uses a specialized material for their diff covers: ductile iron. While it’s cast similar to cast iron, ductile iron is harder and less brittle, and you can weld on it. That means that it’s more versatile and more robust than cast iron.

“If somebody wants to get rid of nuclear waste, they use ductile iron. The thing about ductile iron is that you can put different formulated mixtures into it. I’m not going to give away the secret sauce, but my mixture has a bunch of different things in it to make it a lot stronger. You can mix ductile iron however you want, but with our mixture it’s stronger and designed for exactly what we are using it for.”

Because Fulton uses SOLIDWORKS for all his design work, as well as collaboration and manufacturing, he can input ductile iron as a material. While the program doesn’t know his exact formula of ductile iron, it’s close enough to provide accurate stress testing. He explains, “Basically, I can hold the two tires at the end of the axle, and I can drive force on the diff cover. With our diff cover, it shows the axle bending before the diff cover will give. And that’s straight on pressure—it’s not like real life where you have deflection, where you’ll hit the rock and bounce over it.”

“Testing in SOLIDWORKS gives me a really solid baseline, and then things are more forgiving out in the real world on the trails. In the simulation it’s something like 15,000 lbs of pressure pushing on that thing. You won’t encounter that in real life because the vehicle will just bounce over it at that point,” Fulton adds.

Custom Job Shop and Production Machining Business

While much of Alien Machine Worx’s focus is on their diff covers, Fulton also runs several production parts and one-off custom components for his clients. “We do a lot of production work for other companies. There are times we’ll have a machine dedicated to a customer for months, just working on their product line,” he says.

Because his company has become so well known in the off-road market for their diff covers, Fulton has taken on business building components for other companies in the space. “The diff covers are what has gotten our name out there. So, there are a lot of other companies with off road components that know we know what we’re doing in the off-road space, so we help them build their parts as well.”

“That’s kind of how Alien Machine Worx got its name… we did stuff that other people didn’t want to do. I tell people that if you can go to the store and buy what you need for $50 or $100, you don’t want to come to me. But if you really need something special or unique, then they would come to me and I would build whatever they wanted,” Fulton says.

He once had an off-road race team ask about carrying an extra alternator and starter on their buggy. While the path of least resistance would be to stick the parts in foam inside a toolbox, Fulton decided to go a different route.

“We mounted it on the roll cage so that it was easy to access. So, if their alternator went out as they were going across the desert, they could just jump out, unbolt two bolts on the roll cage, throw those two bolts on the engine compartment, and they were up and running again. We made it quick for them to move from point A to point B without those components flopping around and getting damaged in a toolbox,” he says.

Fulton thrives on doing customized work, which makes sense since the off-road market is all about unique methods of making things work.

Communication Becomes Key

Alien Machine Worx leverages a number of features in SOLIDWORKS, but really it’s about communication. “I had one person fabricate their own steering linkage and it rubbed on our diff cover after he installed it. Because of the way it was built in SOLIDWORKS, he was able to call me, we opened up the model and we did some measurements. Since he was a fabricator, he just took a grinder to the diff cover, and I was able to tell him exactly how much to grind off to make it work and still be safe,” Fulton says.

“SOLIDWORKS allows me to communicate with my customers easily. As a machine shop, I don’t think I’ve seen a blueprint in 10 years thanks to this system.”

Alien Machine Worx works with a variety of clients, both in and out of the off-road industry and some even in the medical space; oftentimes those clients don’t know much about manufacturing. “If somebody sends me their models, the hardest part more often than not is how am I going to fixture or hold them. Not everybody thinks about how they are going to machine a part when they are designing it.”

“Long before I build anything, I can share it with a customer. We’ll change things with a customer’s design to get it to an efficient manufacturability state. Then, we build all of our fixturing, all of our tooling, that’s all done inside SOLIDWORKS.”

Fulton continues to always look for ways to streamline his manufacturing practices, while also finding more efficient ways to design and improve client models.

“I lay in bed at night and come up with designs. Eventually, I need to get up and get them into CAD. I’m always thinking about ways to try and make my product better. That’s what keeps me up at night. What would people prefer to have over the competition. I live and breathe this stuff,” he says.

While Fulton figures that Alien Machine Worx will always have a job shop element to it, he’s sure that their presence in the off-road space is going to grow as well.

Learn about SOLIDWORKS in automotive racing with the whitepaper Giaffone Racing: Expanding Into New Racing Markets with Topology Optimization Tools.

But to be considered smart, I would expect the equipment to anticipate an out-of-tolerance situation and hedge against the defect before it ever exists. For this scenario to come to fruition, several prerequisites must be met—for example, the machine tool must collect data that signals an impending defect. This might show up as an irregular pattern in a servo motor’s torque curve, or the machine base vibrating at a resonant frequency.

In the timeline between the third and fourth Industrial Revolutions, we are at the stage of knowing what needs to be done, and actively working to meet the many “prerequisites” like those above. And this is where tolerance-based machining enters the picture.

On the road toward machine tools that can predict inspection failures, we must first reach a point where software understands what a tolerance is, how to read it, and how to target it.

And it just so happens that SOLIDWORKS CAM’s feature-based approach provides the necessary structure for tolerances to be presented to the manufacturing software (in this case, it is the software creating cutting paths).

In SOLIDWORKS CAM, which is powered by CAMWorks, the fundamental unit is a feature. There are many types of features, and the software understands how they differ from each other:

SOLIDWORKS CAM Milling Features

• Pocket
• Slot
• Corner Slot
• Boss
• Hole [Counterbored/Countersunk/Threaded/Multi-Stepped]
• Open Pocket
• Face
• Perimeter
• Open Profile
• Engrave
• Curve

In milling, SOLIDWORKS CAM recognizes several parameters about each of these features:

• Is the shape circular, rectangular, obround, irregular or wrapped?
• Is it blind or through?
• Does it have a flat or a radiused bottom?
• What is the stock material?
• What is the overall size, depth, and largest inscribed circle?

So SOLIDWORKS CAM features are “smart” in that they are packed full of data ready to be leveraged.

Today we rely largely on experienced CNC programmers to interpret the dimensions of 2D drawings and devise a plan for machining. Instinctually programmers assess their parts for machinable features, weigh the significance of the parameters above, and then develop a strategy to cut the feature. The success of this process is a function of the programmer’s experience.

However, in SOLIDWORKS CAM, a strategy is suggested to the programmer based on the feature’s parameters and what the programmer has successfully done in the past. This is called knowledge-based machining and, when implemented right, it reduces programming time tremendously while increasing quality.

But what about tolerances? That criteria wasn’t listed above and it may be the single most significant factor when choosing how to cut a part! The same physical feature will be cut differently if its tolerance is +/- 0.010 inches vs +/-0.0005 inches, so in order to get to where we want to be (fully automated manufacturing), the tolerance must be considered.

The good news is that both SOLIDWORKS CAM and CAMWorks can add tolerance windows to their criteria for strategy selection. This is a major milestone toward smart manufacturing, and while the technology is still in its infancy, it is very promising.

SOLIDWORKS MBD Dimensions

Beginning with the SOLIDWORKS 2019 release, the tool set formerly known as DimXpert is now MBD Dimensions. Not to be confused with the SOLIDWORKS MBD module, this technology is part of the core SOLIDWORKS install and is available to all users. MBD stands for Model-Based Definition.

MBD Dimensions are part of a broader category known as product manufacturing information (PMI). PMI is information critical to the manufacturing of the part (such as tolerances) that is embedded in the 3D file.

By adding PMI to the 3D CAD file, companies are enabling a paperless workflow. Not only are drawings costly to create, they oftentimes don’t even match the 3D model. Government, education and professional industries are united in their movement away from 2D drawings, and SOLIDWORKS has been working hard for years to make that a reality.

MBD Dimensions can be mundane size or location tolerances, or they can be more complicated GD&T type tolerances.

SOLIDWORKS Geometric Tolerances

• Straightness
• Flatness
• Circularity
• Cylindricity
• Profile of line
• Profile of surface
• Parallel
• Perpendicular
• Angularity
• Circular runout
• Overall runout
• Position
• Concentricity
• Symmetry

Millions of parts are made every year with simple basic dimensions and tolerances, and they work. But the industries that are pursuing Industry 4.0 ideals the hardest make extensive use of GD&T. Therefore, in order to be relevant for a longer period of time, CAM tools seeking to incorporate tolerances into their workflow must be able to interpret GD&T, and the CAMWorks version of this technology does just that. In addition to the GD&T information, CAMWorks TBM can also interpret ISO286 codes commonly seen in shaft and bore drawings, as well as surface finish callouts.

SOLIDWORKS CAM TBM

In SOLIDWORKS CAM, the tolerance-based machining (TBM) tool works much like the regular automatic feature recognition (AFR) feature but also considers tolerance window. Every feature type can be setup with a limitless number of separate tolerance window strategies.

For example, the regular AFR might be setup to choose a “drill” strategy for any hole it finds. When AFR finds a hole, regardless of any tolerance callout that might exist for that feature, it will center the drill and then drill the hole. Done. It is left to the programmer to decide if that is an adequate strategy based on the tolerance callout that (hopefully) exists outside of the 3D model.

When TBM is used, that same hole (with an attached tolerance) would be found and a strategy that matches the level of precision needed would be automatically suggested. A hole with a tolerance window of only 0.002 inches might be assigned the “ream” strategy, while a hole with a wide-open 0.020-inch window could be assigned “drill only.”

Holes are the simplest application for this technology, and TBM handles these features very well. As features become more complex and the type of potential tolerances expands, TBM becomes less foolproof but still worthwhile.

This is a journey, and SOLIDWORKS sees the massive upside for strong tolerance-based machining capabilities. As we’ve discussed, it’s a critical prerequisite to the smart manufacturing of tomorrow.

It’s Not Just Milling

We’ve based this discussion on a milling example, but SOLIDWORKS CAM and TBM will also handle lathe parts. SOLIDWORKS CAM Professional knows several different types of turn features:

• Outer diameter
• Inner diameter
• Groove
• Face
• Cut-off

Each of these features are tracked in the technology database (TechDB) the same way the milling features are. SOLIDWORKS CAM recognizes turn features and suggests an appropriate strategy to the programmer. And if a feature carries a tolerance, TBM will account for that, too.

Taken one step further, multi-tasking machines that combine both milling and turning on the same platform are also supported, but only in the CAMWorks product line. There, we can program and sync up to four tool turrets and both a main and a sub-spindle.

Where Do We Go From Here?

In my opinion, SOLIDWORKS TBM is primed to play the role of “tolerance interpreter” in the grand scheme of Industry 4.0 manufacturing. I’m not aware of any other tool that is doing what TBM does, and it has room to do so much more.

Not all tolerances are symmetrical, and not all 3D models are drawn to nominal dimensions. A robust TBM technology will perhaps accommodate for this by altering the side allowance of the feature. Currently, this is done manually by the programmer but there is little to stop SOLIDWORKS from automating this process.

Another potential automation is the moving of features in XYZ space. If a part has a better chance of passing inspection if the features were cut slightly differently than how the 3D model was drawn, then the programmer can move the CAM feature (without altering the underlying CAD). I’m certain that TBM will eventually automate this process and take advantage of bonus tolerances born out of the GD&T that human programmers failed to spot.

Between MBD Dimensions, SOLIDWORKS CAM TBM, and other upcoming technologies, the world for a SOLIDWORKS user is looking very smart—and very paperless.

If you haven’t explored SOLIDWORKS TBM, or SOLIDWORKS CAM in general, I highly encourage you to do so. It is installed and available to all SOLIDWORKS users who are currently on subscription.

Cloud computing will be necessary to handle the large volume of data for connected manufacturing equipment and the digital twin. (Image courtesy of Amazon Web Services.)

Large industrial software vendors like GE, IBM and Siemens, amongst others, have pushed the concept of the digital twin— a full integration of the physical with the virtual world. In essence, this means that all product design data is available at the time of production. As an example, the full design data of a car body is compared in real-time with the as-is built data in a car body shop. In addition,production-relevant data is fed back into the design process, also reflected as closed-loop engineering. This frontloading of information will allow better decisions at a very early point of the product lifecycle and generate additional value. With asset data available in real-time from production through data aggregation and IoT, predictive and prescriptive applications will generate insight to increase overall equipment efficiency (OEE) and lift value from manufacturing assets in operation.

But, what happens as soon as insight is generated and the status of the physical process needs to be changed to a better state? In manufacturing for discrete and process industries, the process is defined by fixed code routines and programmable parameters. It has its own world of control code languages and standards to define the behavior of controllers, robot arms, sensors and actuators of all kinds. This world has remained remarkably stable over the past 40-plus years. Control code resides on a controller and special tools, as well as highly skilled automation engineers, who define the behavior of a specific production system. Changing the state of an existing and running production system changes the programs and parameters required to physically access the automation equipment—OT equipment needs to be re-programmed, often on every single component locally. To give a concrete example, let’s assume we can determine from field data, using applied machine learning (also referenced as Industrial IoT), that a behavior of a robotic handling process needs to be adapted. In the existing world, production needs to stop. A skilled engineer needs to physically re-teach or flash the robot controller. The new movement needs to be tested individually and in context of the adjacent production components. Finally, production can start again. This process can take minutes to hours depending on the complexity of the production system.

Current production systems are trimmed to high stability and low variability. For example, automotive production has a plethora of product variants, but still has an inflexible production system. With a car model lifetime lasting several years, production managers have learned to live with this inflexibility and value stable processes. However, customer- and technology-invoked trends will increase the need of fully flexible industrial control systems. First, the speed of innovation increases due to improved design systems and customer demand. For example, the product lifecycle of Volkswagen’s Golf I was 10 years and has now been shortened to three years for the Golf VI [3]. Second, requirements for customization increase steadily. Third, intelligent algorithms will produce a steady stream of proposals for process improvement. If we assume that Industrial IoT will fulfill its promises, the majority of manufacturers will be able to gain constant insight. Companies that are able to execute these insights faster will have a competitive advantage. Additionally, every new state of a production and supply chain system will be seen as a new experiment and fed back into ML systems, ultimately generating a virtuous cycle of a self-improving system.

The billion-dollar question will be: How can we design a system that immediately implements new insights? Similar to how cloud computing allows access to IT resources, as if they were software in a fully virtualized manner, a concept I named Software Defined Automation can unchain industrial automation from physical limitations. To realize this, all control code has a digital twin in the virtual world. The local instance is constantly updated from the virtual master code. A virtual model of the whole production system provides context for control code—these manufacturing planning systems are already heavily used by e.g. line builders for automotive and provided by major PLM software providers.

Having a full digital twin of a production system, including control code, insights can immediately be pushed down to change the state of a production system. For the case of Amazon Web Services’ edge technology, Greengrass, we are talking about milliseconds for locations in mainland Europe. Comparing this with hours of lost optimal production time, the potential of Software Defined Automation becomes evident.

Still, human interaction will be required. Production systems will optimize themselves based on simulated and real experiment. Improvements will rapidly be propagated around the globe. Labor will optimize the learning, not the system. This could also differ over time or by external influence. In times where renewable energy was cheap, output could have been one of the core drivers for optimization, while the minimization of input factors could have been paramount in other circumstances.

With the release of edge platforms, the technology is here today to minimize the time from insight to reaction. The power of the cloud is and will be the core enabler to realize software-defined automation fast and at an affordable cost.

[1]https://bdi.eu/media/user_upload/Digitale_Transformation.pdf

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2017/08/08/top-5-digital-transformation-trends-in-manufacturing/#6ff9b733249f

[3] https://www.sjf.tuke.sk/transferinovacii/pages/archiv/transfer/29-2014/pdf/251-253.pdf

About the Author

Dr. Josef Waltl leads the global partner ecosystem for Industrial Software at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Prior to AWS he worked in Siemens building on software strategy & M&A for PLM, Smart Grid and Mobility. He holds a PhD and MBA from the Technical University Munich as well as an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Salzburg.

Not that I’d trust my piloting skills, but there is one company that might make it possible to make the flight from my tiny town to somewhere globally more relevant.

The CH750 Cruzer from Zenith Aircraft Company. (Image courtesy of Zenith Aircraft Company.)

Zenith Aircraft Company sells airplane kits. These aren’t the sorts of kits you pick up from a hobby shop for a meticulously fun Sunday afternoon. These are full-scale aircraft. We spoke to Zenith founder Sebastien Heintz to learn what it takes to create an airplane kit, including the CAD tools used to make one.

The Birth of the Kit Aircraft Industry

Heintz’s father, Chris Heintz, inspired the creation of Zenith. The elder Heintz earned an engineering degree in the 1960s, which he applied to design work on the Concorde. At the time, he wanted to own his own aircraft, but such a dream seemed out of reach— unless he built his own.

Chris Heintz went about designing his own two-seat, all-metal aircraft, which led to fellow flying aficionados commissioning designs and parts from him before he ultimately helped spawn an entire aircraft kit industry.

Sebastien Heintz grew up in the family business, developing a love for airplanes and all things flying. After attending business school, he founded Zenith Aircraft Company in Missouri in 1992. Through Zenith, the younger Heintz not only extended the work of his father, but modernized it, moving the business over from pen-and-paper drafting and manual manufacturing, to a completely digital workflow, including the use of SOLIDWORKS.

What It Takes to Make Kit Airplanes

So, what’s an aircraft kit? Imagine those balsawood planes you might find at a hobby store, blow it up 200 times, replace the wood with aluminum and you can start to imagine what Zenith makes. Though highly specialized, the industry is bigger than one might expect.

“There are more kit airplanes registered with the Federal Aviation Association (FAA) every year than there are factory built ones,” Sebastien Heintz said.

Zenith designs and manufactures aircraft kits, creating the individual parts to assemble the airframe—tail, rudder, cabin, etc.—leaving customers to purchase the engine and avionics. The company tries to put out one kit per working day, totaling about 250 per year. The kits can range around $20,000, and the engine and avionics typically cost an additional $20,000 each.

Altogether, the cost of a two-seater airplane compares to a luxury automobile or boat, but the experience of building it yourself is priceless. Plus, you get to pick out the engine, paint colors, upholstery and everything yourself, resulting in a customized plane.

“We design certain features like you would with any other product, like a car or boat: the actual wing, the position and location of the wing, the tail, etc. That part of the process isn’t really customized,” Sebastien Heintz said. “That said, every individual airplane becomes a one-off airplane. That’s one of the advantages and why the industry exists. People can build their own airplane and customize their needs. They get to choose the design because there are quite a few different designs out there. Then they can truly fully customize it as they’re choosing the engine on the airplane by choosing the avionics, radios and GPS equipment, for instance.”

If the idea of building your own airplane sounds fun, but a little daunting, Zenith hosts two-day workshops at its Missouri factory, where attendees pay to take part in the hands-on construction of the rudder tail section of an aircraft. At 3-feet tall and 2-feet deep, this component can be built easily in two days.

Sebastien Heintz explained that many customers have never really built anything before, but have a keen interest in learning.

“The real takeaway for folks is not only can they build it, but that they have invested in that interest,” he said. “It becomes more of a question of enjoying the learning process and not whether or not you have the skills and experience to build an airplane.”

If you do decide, one day, to take on such a project, it will take about 500 hours of work. Fitting this into your off-hours, vacation days and weekends, Sebastien Heintz estimates that this works out to about one to two years.

Manufacturing Kit Planes in the 21^st Century

Until Sebastien Heintz took over the family’s kit plane business in 1992, the operation was entirely dependent on manual labor: hand drafting and hand manufacturing.

“Back in ’92, most of our design work was basically done with pen and paper, and we were using basic sheet metal bending brakes and press brakes, cutting the parts out manually,” he said. “Little by little we started using CAD software, both for drafting purposes and, more and more, for design purposes. Now, we’ve pretty much switched all our design and parts drafting and so forth over to SOLIDWORKS.”

All of the kit parts required to build the CH750 Cruzer from Zenith Aircraft Company. (Image courtesy of Zenith Aircraft Company.)

Zenith manufactures the individual parts for its kits in-house, beginning with aluminum alloy sheet metal. The planes are first designed in SOLIDWORKS by the company’s engineers before the parts are translated into CAM for production. Zenith has several large CNC tables for cutting out the parts and CNC press brakes to shape the parts.

“That’s really where SOLIDWORKS kicks in, both on the design side and manufacturing side. It allows us to take manufacturing to the next level,” Sebastien Heintz said. “Because the design is a solid model, we can really finalize everything completely to the last definition. We can then send the SOLIDWORKS data to the CNC machine to make the part.”

Prior to adopting SOLIDWORKS about four years ago, Zenith would drill the necessary holes in individual pieces, including the rivets necessary to attach parts together, after they were manufactured. This could add up to more than 16,000 holes. Now, the team is able to drill holes while they’re in the flat stage. This also ensures that once the parts are cut and bent, they line up perfectly for assembly. Not only has this made the design and manufacturing process easier, but it’s even made life easier for customers assembling the airplanes.

“Before, we were using Mechanical Desktop and could lay out one section, but we didn’t have a full 3D model of what it was we were working on,” Sebastien Heintz said. “Now, building everything as a solid model with SOLIDWORKS, we can accurately reflect the final design, actually locate every single hole and then send that to the CNC. Even though we’re starting from flat parts, we can drill the holes and then swing them together after and the holes will translate exactly where they need to be.”

Assembly is made even easier because Zenith is able to post its SOLIDWORKS designs online. A couple of years ago, Dassault Systèmes started offering its free SOLIDWORKS Maker Edition to members of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA). Because most Zenith customers are members of the EAA, they can access Zenith’s designs. This also makes it easier for customers to customize their planes, finding avionics that will suit the design, for instance.

The SOLIDWORKS model for the CH750 Cruzer from Zenith Aircraft Company. (Image courtesy of Zenith Aircraft Company.)

According to Sebastien Heintz, the company continues to look at how it can use SOLIDWORKS tools in its design and manufacturing process. For instance, SOLIDWORKS has integrated CAM directly into SOLIDWORKS 2018, something that he is exploring. The company has begun using simulation tools, as well.

In the process of partnering with the EAA, Dassault Systèmes became enamored with the kit aircraft industry. Its employees present at the event had never been exposed to kit airplanes. They were so intrigued that they flew SOLIDWORKS CEO Gian Paolo Bassi to the Zenith factory, which ultimately inspired the company to purchase a Zenith kit for assembly at its headquarters in Waltham, Mass.

“[SOLIDWORKS] has managers, coders and engineers working on it. Their goal obviously isn’t to fly an airplane. It’s more of a hands-on building project that showcases what you can do with SOLIDWORKS in the everyday world,” Sebastien Heintz said. “It’s also become a fun team-building effort. Everyone I’ve talked to that’s worked on it has really enjoyed it. If you’re working in front of a computer screen all day, it’s refreshing to get in the shop, work with your hands and see how the parts come together, especially if you can connect that back to what you’re working on with the computer.”

If you’re thinking about building your own Zenith kit, visit the company’s website.

Figure 1 shows a mold design for an electric power drill housing.

Figure 1. A mold design for an electric power drill housing.

The surface quality of the mold will determine the plastic housing surface quality of the final product. Then how can you specify the quality requirements? In 2D drawings, you may define the surface finish symbols with 2D annotations as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Surface finish symbols on a 2D drawing.

The challenge is that these annotations are attached to lines and curves projected on a 2D sheet, rather than attached to the desired target features on a 3D model. So it’s difficult for a machinist to fully understand which surfaces the symbols are controlling, especially for irregular or organic shapes in this power drill housing example. Furthermore, even if a machinist can understand the requirements, he or she has to look back and forth between a 2D drawing and 3D CAM program to manually extract the parameters and enter them into a CAM program.

SOLIDWORKS MBD and SOLIDWORKS CAM Tolerance Based Machining have provided a 3D angle to tackle these challenges. Figures 3 and 4 show the 3D Surface Finish Symbol tool from the Annotations menu command and the SOLIDWORKS MBD command bar.

Figure 3. The 3D Surface Finish Symbol tool in the Annotations command under the Insert menu.

Figure 4. The 3D Surface Finish Symbol tool on the SOLIDWORKS MBD command bar.

With this tool, you can define the surface finish symbols to the desirable faces directly on the 3D model as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Define a surface finish symbol directly to the desirable face.

What if there are multiple faces sharing the same finish requirement? Figure 6 illustrates that you can show the leader line of a symbol and then drag and drop its anchor point to multiple desired faces.

Figure 6. Show the leader line, and then drag and drop its anchor point to multiple desired faces.

With that, we can complete several surface finish definitions to the target faces as shown in Figure 7. Please notice the cross highlighting from the symbols to the controlled features, which provides an intuitive visual confirmation of the design requirements.

Figure 7. Cross highlight from a surface finish symbol to multiple controlled faces.

Now that the 3D specifications are defined, we can move on to the machining step. On the SOLIDWORKS CAM TBM command bar, please first click on the Settings button as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. The Tolerance Based Machining Settings button on the SOLIDWORKS CAM TBM command bar.

On the settings dialog, as shown in Figure 9, please switch to the Multisurface Features tab.

Figure 9. Multisurface Features Settings.

You may notice the surface finish ranges, corresponding strategy and the color coding. Let’s modify these settings to better reflect the mold design requirements in this case. Figure 10 shows the dialog to adjust the ranges.

Figure 10. Adjust the surface finish ranges.

To delete a range boundary, hit the Delete key on the keyboard. To add a new boundary, type it in and hit the green + button. What’s nice here is that the boundary series is sequenced automatically.

Next, let’s adjust the strategies assigned to these ranges. You can simply choose from the strategies in the dropdown list as shown in Figure 11. These current strategies are driven by the SOLIDWORKS CAM technical database, which can be customized to allow more options. Of course, these strategies will lead to corresponding operation plans such as tool selections, speeds and feeds.

Figure 11. Assign the machining strategies for the new surface finish ranges.

To differentiate the surface qualities on different faces, I recommend a clear color coding. You can easily adjust them as shown in Figure 12. For example, I set tight requirements in red or orange colors just to catch machinists’ attention.

Figure 12. Adjust the color coding to differentiate the surface qualities.

Now let’s run the software to automatically assign the machining strategies and color codes according to the specific surface finish requirements. First, click on the Run Tolerance Based Machining button on the command bar to invoke the dialog as shown in Figure 13.

Figure 13. The Tolerance Based Machining Execution dialog.

Please notice that the ranges, strategies and color codes are inherited from the settings dialog as shown in Figure 12. However, you can still make adjustments for this local execution from the overall settings. Also among the five ranges, the black text lines indicate that the software has found surface finish requirements in these ranges, while the magenta text lines signal that none of the surface finishes fall into those ranges.

Next, switch to the Run tab and ensure these boxes are checked: “Recognize tolerance range,” “Recognize multisurface features based on surface finish,” “Apply color to multisurface features” and “Automatic Feature Recognition.” Figure 14 shows the necessary check boxes.

Figure 14. Necessary check boxes on the Run tab.

Now it’s time to hit OK and let the software automatically recognize the 3D surface finish symbols. Figure 15 shows the manufacturing feature tree and color-coded surfaces. Please notice that the 32 finish face is the tightest requirement and has been painted red. Its tree node show “Fine” as the machining strategy. The 63 finish face is painted orange, and its strategy is set to Area Clearance, Z Level. The 125 finish is a loose requirement, so it is painted green and shares the Area Clearance, Z Level method.

Figure 15. Automatically assign machining strategies, color codes according to the 3D surface finishes.

With the rule-based software, engineering changes are quick and easy to accommodate. For example, let’s say you add several more faces to a 200 finish requirement as shown in Figure 16.

Figure 16. Add more faces to a new surface finish symbol.

Just rerun the Tolerance Based Machining and you will see the updated result in Figure 17.

Figure 17. Updated machining strategy and colored faces.

You may find the new faces have been painted blue and linked to a tree node with a Coarse strategy in response to the 200 surface finish symbol.

To conclude, let’s remember that SOLIDWORKS allows 3D surface finishes to be defined to target features directly on a model. Then SOLIDWORKS CAM Tolerance Based Machining can analyze and act upon these surface finishes to automate the NC programing. You can customize the rules yourself, such as the surface finish ranges, matching strategies and color codes. Then the software can read the specific annotations attached to specific features to assign the strategies and color coding accordingly. Upon design changes, updating the machining preparations, operation plans and NC code programs can be as easy as a rerun of the Tolerance Based Machining tool.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave the min the comments area below. To learn more about how SOLIDWORKS CAM can help implement your model-based enterprises (MBE), please visit its product page.

About the Author

Oboe Wu is a SOLIDWORKS product manager with 20 years of experience in engineering and software. He is an advocate of model-based enterprise and smart manufacturing.

SOLIDWORKS CAM is designed to automate manufacturing programming for 3D data created in SOLIDWORKS 2018, marking another step toward manufacturing information arriving in the shop without drawings.

SOLIDWORKS CAM for 2.5-axis milling and turning is powered by long-time SOLIDWORKS partner CAMWorks (click for video). The decision to include SOLIDWORKS CAM with SOLIDWORKS 2018 is part of long-term strategy to build a comprehensive and robust manufacturing ecosystem. (Image courtesy of SOLIDWORKS.)

For designers and engineers, access to SOLIDWORKS CAM means having a better understanding of how their 3D data will be interpreted by rules-based machining with knowledge-based machining (KBM) captured for manufacturing. This will enable them to incorporate design decisions and revisions based on the limits of their machining and manufacturing capabilities.

By making more informed design decisions based on this knowledge, design teams can machine prototypes and manufacture them inhouse, which will enable them to control quality, time to market and delivery costs. SOLIDWORKS CAM also empowers companies to employ “build-to-order” strategies—where custom parts can be designed and CAM code generated much faster.

SOLIDWORKS CAM Overview

As designers want to check the manufacturability of their designs earlier in the design process, having an integrated CAM system closes the knowledge gap between the digital design data and how that data will translate into its physical form when it is machined.

SOLIDWORKS calls this a Smart Manufacturing ecosystem, and it includes Model-Based Definition (MBD), Costing and Inspection. Another benefit of this integrated CAM system is that it automatically updates toolpaths as changes and updates are made to parts.

SOLIDWORKS CAM is available as an add-in to every version of SOLIDWORKS Desktop for users on the subscription plan.

By utilizing the data-rich 3D CAD model to reduce repetitious manual steps that exist in development processes like programming CNC machines, SOLIDWORKS CAM should save users from making common errors, as well as save them time.

The fundamental structure of SOLIDWORKS CAM uses KBM to make the programming process more efficient. It does this by giving users some headroom to learn as they program. This gives them the ability to focus on pertinent design decisions based on the components or assemblies they’re working on.

Another practical application of SOLIDWORKS CAM is that it not only gives users the foresight to understand how the features of their digital 3D CAD designs will be interpreted by CNC machines, but also gives them insight into how much it will cost to manufacture them.

Key Features of SOLIDWORKS CAM

1. It enables users to program in either an assembly or a part environment.
2. It can interpret surface finishes and tolerances to optimize the best routes for manufacturing a part.
3. It automatically applies standard manufacturing strategies to increase efficiency and uniformity.
4. It performs automated quoting and analyzes against traditional methods to account for every characteristic of the part in advance.
5. It makes automatic adjustments of machining strategies based on tolerance specifications and model-based definition.
6. Its Automatic Feature Recognition gives users automatically generated machine programming for prismatic parts by referencing programming standards.
7. It has 2.5-axis functionality with part and assembly machining.

Tolerance-Based Machining

Let’s say you’re a CNC programmer or machinist and you use SOLIDWORKS. You come across a part file created by a designer or an engineer and it has data such as tolerances and dimensions that you can see. Your job is to prepare the part to be manufactured.

Every bit of data about the part is critical for CNC programmers and machinists. The part must be manufactured with total precision for it to pass quality assurance (QA). As a machinist or CNC programmer, you may have to alter the machining size or geometric features to develop, create and manufacture a part that is going to meet the demands of the tolerances made by the part’s creator, whether they are a designer or an engineer.

Integrated CAM tools have enabled machinists and CNC programmers to meet the needs of designers and engineers by creating toolpaths based mainly on the part’s geometry, but not without some difficulty. In SOLIDWORKS CAM 2018, machinists and CNC programmers need to perform less drudge work because machining strategies are based on tolerance data rather than part geometry. (Image courtesy of SOLIDWORKS.)

SOLIDWORKS CAM will automatically identify machinable features and provide suggested machining strategies. Since data from the tolerances of a part file inform machining decisions, a CNC machinist or programmer will see both symmetric and asymmetric linear tolerances. If you are dealing with asymmetric linear tolerances, SOLIDWORKS CAM 2018 will automatically adjust the machining allowance on the wall to give you the best chance at manufacturing to QA standards.

So, instead of programming or machining to CAD data, the tolerance data is used to create automatic machining strategies, but what about surface finish callout data? Say you have two access surfaces with surface finish callout data. Tolerance-based machining in SOLIDWORKS CAM 2018 works in the same way by identifying machinable features. When it comes across surfaces with surface finish callouts, the software will automatically create separate features and machining strategies for each of those two surfaces.

Tolerance-based machining doesn’t quite cover certain depth parameters, parallelism and concentricity—but there is a product roadmap in place to create feature recognition to identify these and other missing “wish list” features.

Bottom Line

As the industry continues to move away from 2D drawings, the amount of information that is contained within a 3D CAD file format is increasing. Adding product and manufacturing information (PMI) data and other manufacturing data is becoming more commonplace within SOLIDWORKS software.

With SOLIDWORKS CAM so accessible to engineers and designers, they’ll be able to pack more manufacturing data into 3D CAD models, CAM users like designers, engineers, CNC programmers and machinists will benefit from the automatic machining strategies provided by SOLIDWORKS CAM.

And it’s free! As long as you are a subscriber.

Not Enough? Let’s Look at SOLIDWORKS CAM Pro

If you do need more functionality, such as turning, high-speed machining or 5-axis machining, SOLIDWORKS CAM Pro may be worth the extra cost.

SOLIDWORKS CAM Pro has a number of features that are not included in SOLIDWORKS CAM, particularly when it comes to turning features:

General Features Included in SOLIDWORKS CAM Pro:

1. Automatic Feature Recognition – Turn.
2. Indexing of the 4th & 5th axes including tombstone
3. Assembly Machining
4. CAMWorks Configurations

Turning Features Included in SOLIDWORKS CAM Pro

1. Face Rough
2. Face Finish
3. Rough Turn
4. Finish Turn
5. OD Threading
6. Cut-off
7. Groove Rough
8. Groove Finish
9. Bore Rough
10. Bore Finish
11. Center Drill – on center
12. Tap – on center
13. ID Threading

Complete list of the differences between SOLIDWORKS CAM Standard and SOLIDWORKS CAM Pro.

SOLIDWORKS has sponsored ENGINEERING.com to write this article. It has provided no editorial input. All opinions are mine, except where quoted or stated otherwise. —Andrew Wheeler

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment area below. If you are a designer, where would you specify asymmetrical tolerances? If you are a machinist, how would you handle asymmetrical tolerances?

Prashant Kulkarni shared his experiences with GE Power and Water. Figure 1 shows a drawing that he encountered, in which a hole diameter was defined as 1.5 in with a tolerance range of +0.0035 to -0.005 in, along with other asymmetrical tolerance requirements.

Figure 1. A drawing with asymmetrical tolerance ranges. (Image courtesy of GE.)

The designers wanted to make sure that a 1.5-in drill is used, so the hole can't be smaller than 1.5 in, except for the tolerance of the drill itself, which is 0.005 in.

On the other hand, for machinists, machining to the nominal dimension with an asymmetrical tolerance range would feel similar to driving a vehicle closely to one side of the lane but far away from the other side, rather than staying in the middle of the lane. The wiggle room on the nearside would be much smaller than the far side. One deviation on the near side could exceed the limit and scrap the part, while the same deviation could be tolerated on the far side.

You can manage to make it work if the upper and lower limits are spread apart on both sides of the nominal. It just increases the risks. However, for unilateral tolerances in which the limits are only on one side, machining to the nominal wouldn't work at all because the nominal dimension itself is out of the tolerance range.

Therefore, a typical handling of an asymmetrical tolerance window is to calculate its mean dimension to reach a symmetrical tolerance range. In other words, machining to the mean, rather than the nominal, allows machinists to drive safely in the middle of the lane. The benefit is to even the penalization risks between the upper and lower limits, increase the finished part pass rate and save the overall manufacturing cost.

That was what the GE manufacturing engineers ended up doing to the drawing in Figure 1. They manually modified the model features to reach symmetrical tolerance ranges. For the example above, the hole size was tweaked to 1.515 ± 0.020 in.

But throughout a design, there can be a large number of asymmetrical tolerance ranges. This kind of manual modification can take lots of a manufacturing engineer's time and introduce unnecessary human errors. To answer this challenge, CAMWorks came up with a solution shown in the green circle in Figure 2, “Machine to Mean.”

Figure 2. A “Machine to Mean” option in CAMWorks.

This option automatically assigns the cutter allowances to arrive at the mean sizes with symmetrical tolerance ranges, so that you don't have to tweak the model manually or recalculate the tolerances any more.

Let's take a look at one example as shown in Figure 3, in which the highlighted nominal pocket width size of 110 mm is defined with a tolerance range of +0.15 to -0.25 mm.

Figure 3. A nominal pocket width size is defined with an asymmetrical tolerance range, highlighted in green at the lower-left corner.

Don's scratch your head yet. Instead of running the numbers in your head or on a piece of paper, you can now run the CAMWorks tolerance-based machine. Figure 4 shows that the milling contour operation is automatically created. Furthermore, please pay attention to the tree node where the mean tolerance value is calculated automatically as 0.025 mm in the green circle.

Figure 4. A contour milling operation is automatically created with a mean tolerance value of 0.025 mm.

If you double-click on this milling operation, you will see the highlighted side allowance 0.025 mm at the upper-left corner on the dialog box as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. The side allowance is automatically calculated as 0.025 mm.

By the way, the allowance stands for the amount of material to leave on the sides of the part for a later contour milling cycle. This value is the actual distance the cutter stays away from the finished part. The amount is defined per side. The allowance can be positive or negative. Negative values up to the radius of the tool can be specified and will cause the tool path to overcut the part.

Just in case you are wondering how the allowance is calculated, let me walk you through the steps. First, let's calculate the mean width size, which is the average of the upper and lower limits, or (110.15 + 109.75)/2 = 109.95 mm. Then figure out the offset from the nominal size to the mean size—that is, 110 – 109.95 = 0.05 mm. Last, just evenly distribute the offset to both sides of the width feature, which is 0.025 mm as shown in Figures 4 and 5.

Here is another example as shown in Figure 6. The slot size is 30 mm wide and 70 mm long, with a unilateral tolerance zone on both the width and length from +0.1 to 0.0 mm.

Figure 6. A contour milling operation on multiple slots of a unilateral tolerance range from +0.1 to 0.0 mm.

Now you may wonder which nominal size to use here: the width of 30 mm or the length of 70 mm. The answer is that it doesn't matter. What matters is the tolerance distribution. Let's use the 30 mm as an example. The mean width is (30.1 + 30)/2, or 30.05 mm. Then the offset from the nominal size to the mean is 30 – 30.05, or -0.05 mm, so the cutter allowance on one side is half of that, or -0.025 mm, as shown in the tree node in Figure 6. You can verify it with the 70-mm length size yourself.

Please note the material allowance is negative here. It means that the cutter will overcut the part so that the openings are bigger than the nominal sizes, as required by the tolerance zones.

Now let’s capture the calculation in a formula as shown below, just in case you want to verify the allowances.

The material allowance = - (upper tolerance + lower tolerance)/4

However, the good news is that you don’t have to remember this formula, manually run these calculations or modify the tolerances any more. No matter how many asymmetrical tolerance ranges there are, CAMWorks takes the allowances into consideration automatically for the numerical control code programming. To learn more about machining to the mean size, please visit the CAMWorks product page.

About the Author

Oboe Wu is a SOLIDWORKS product manager with 20 years of experience in engineering and software. He is an advocate of model-based enterprise and smart manufacturing.

When looking at the entire lifecycle of a product during this process, it becomes clear that much of the information developed at an early stage by designers and engineers can be optimized and leveraged throughout the entire supply chain. Model-based enterprise (MBE) technology is one way to handle this; as a single evolving digital master data set, it contains a 3D model and all of the relevant supporting data information needed throughout a product’s lifecycle. This helps significantly in streamlining how products large and small are being brought to market across multiple stakeholders.

CheckMate for SOLIDWORKS includes functionalities for coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) and soft gauge programming applications (Image courtesy of Origin International.)

By aiming to assist designers and engineers in bringing better products to market faster and with reduced costs, Origin’s CheckMate for SOLIDWORKS suite of dimensional metrology software aids in translating design intent and manufacturing information to the inspection and manufacturing engineering environment for SOLIDWORKS users. It does this using existing product manufacturing information. Founded in 1992, Origin, a SOLIDWORKS Certified Solution Partner, develops metrology solutions for manufacturing engineers across a multitude of industries, including aerospace, oil and gas, consumer goods and automotive.

While the specific needs and benefits of CheckMate for SOLIDWORKS vary greatly between use case scenarios, the suite of applications offers manufacturing engineers a valuable advantage with multiple standout features that can be employed across different MBE applications.

CheckMate for SOLIDWORKS is a software solution for reverse engineering and inspecting parts. (Image courtesy of Javelin Technologies.)

Other capabilities of the CheckMate suite include support for coordinate measuring machine (CMM) and soft gauge programming applications. CheckMate offers users a common language to program CMMs of multiple vendors offline with intelligent coordinate system reporting capabilities and dimensional measurement equipment support. Additionally, CheckMate’s SoftOrient application helps streamline the orientation of CMMs to free-form surfaces or less-than-perfect features on prismatic parts.

While CheckMate Programming and SoftOrient lend support to CMM and soft gauge programming applications, Point Cloud Metrology (PCM) offers a bridge between modern scanning technologies—such as laser scanning—and CAD-based metrology and inspection tools for accurate parts. Based on a pictorial reporting method, PCM automates the process of aligning cloud data to a CAD model while performing a surface compare evaluation with a color gradient map to highlight any resulting deviations. The result is a powerful evaluation tool for making more informed decisions related to process changes and sample sizes.

A demonstration of PCM generating a ColorMap from xyz scan data and automatically extracting actuals at predefined surface locations. (Image courtesy of Origin International.)

For nonconforming parts, the SoftFit Solver simulations highlight the impact of dimensional corrections on a specific area while demonstrating how those changes impact other features of the part—ultimately resulting in a better part and tool design with fewer iterations.

Finally, the CheckMate suite makes communicating this information across multiple stakeholders easy, as the fully integrated CheckMate Reporting application generates reports quickly, regardless of the current stage in a process or the task at hand. With itsinteroperability features, CheckMate Reporting can also generate reports in coordinate systems other than the one in which the part was measured—such as for CAD, tooling, car or ship coordinates.

As modern software tools and MBE continue to revolutionize the way data is created and shared, effective and clear communication will be key to successfully driving products through their lifecycle. Through integrating SOLIDWORKS MBD into its CheckMate for SOLIDWORKS suite, Origin promises a useful solution for maintaining communication for manufacturing engineers across the inspection and manufacturing engineering environment.

About the Author

Simon Martin is a writer and industrial designer in New York City.

To get to know the company, the first thing you should be aware of is that OPEN MIND produces CAD/CAM software as well as postprocessors for the design and manufacture of complex molds and parts. The company offers 2D solutions packed with features for milling standard parts and software for five-axis simultaneous machining, among other products.

hyperMILL for SOLIDWORKS

OPEN MIND has an integrated CAM solution that you may find useful for high-performance engineering as well as tool and mold manufacturing and design. The central idea behind making a product like hyperMILL for SOLIDWORKS is to empower users to transform their CAD designs into numerical control (NC) code for machining without leaving SOLIDWORKS and worrying about interoperability issues or any other hiccups a user can experience transferring design data to third-party CAM software.

Not having to leave your design environment has several advantages. As an integrated process with universal data models, the production process is more transparent and secure. The obvious general productivity benefit of using a familiar design interface is that more people want to use it. Additionally, an entirely new software doesn’t need to be learned or taught, which also can simplify operations and increase efficiency in a given production process.

OPEN MIND Technologies accomplished something pretty remarkable by creating one user interface in SOLIDWORKS with 2D, 3D, high-speed cutting (HSC) and 5-axis machining strategies, as well as a mill turn module. With these options available  in the popular CAD software from Dassault Systèmes, users have simple yet sophisticated choices to create the best machining strategy. The better the strategy is, the less users find themselves spending time on programming and machining, which increases efficiency and productivity. This counts big time for everyone concerned with keeping costs down and getting new products, parts, molds and tools to market on time or even a bit early.

Standardizing and Automating CAM Tasks

One of the goals OPEN MIND has strived to accomplish with hyperMILL is to make the programming of 5-axis tasks as easy and familiar as 3D programming. Avoidance features and collision checking help make this possible with 5-axis tasks and hyperMILL automatically calculates tool positions with one preference angle inputted by the user. Machining strategies and tools can be combined, stored and retrieved from a graphical database, which is useful when users are creating CAM programs.

Checking the programs built by users is easy with OPEN MIND Utilities, because it amplifies the ability to make changes to tool paths right up to and including the last phase.

With hyperMILL, users can:

• perform multi-axis machining
• machine surfaces
• use hole feature recognition
• machine on surfaces
• perform milling and turning in one operation
• program and execute 5-axis drilling and mill and turn in one integrated operation.

For manufacturing operations, this means reduced cycle times.

Tangent Plane Machining in hyperMILL with Conical Barrel Cutter

OPEN MIND hit the whiteboards pretty hard and came up with a totally new kind of milling tool geometry to machine faces with minimal curvature using a conical barrel cutter. If you aren’t familiar with barrel-shaped tools, they use a portion of their circumference to allow for a 500-mm cutting radius.

The conical barrel cutter was integrated by OPEN MIND for hyperMILL to enhance what the company calls its tangent plane machining strategy. In order to spend less time machining vertiginous and bottom surfaces, the conical barrel cutters employed in this strategy cut machining time by 90 percent during tangent plane machining.

A conical barrel cutter using hyperMILL’s tangent plane machining strategy cuts into a structural part. The 500-mm radius is much larger than that of a ball end mill. (Image courtesy of OPEN MIND Technologies.)

Depending on what type of machining you’re doing, you may use a general barrel cutter or a tangential barrel cutter, but if you’re machining steep or flat planes in undercut situations, the conical barrel cutter will work best. hyperMILL also automatically aligns and nestles the conical barrel cutter to avoid collisions and mistakes that will cost you time and money.

Replacing the Traditional Ball Mill with the Conical Barrel Cutter

hyperMILL’s automatic alignment and nestling of barrel cutters is part of what OPEN MIND calls the “MAXX Machining” strategy. This coined term signifies the ability of users to automatically support the geometry and perform collision checking of conical barrel cutters as well as tangential barrel cutters and lens tools.

The CAM industry’s reaction to the MAXX Machining strategy has so far been cautious but optimistic. With any new change in machining strategies, the main issue is convincing cutting tool vendors to get on board and produce a tool that only displays a circle segment of the cutter. Quickgrind was one of the first to get on board. For other tool producers, a really important thing to remember for customers who want to keep their machine shop as up to date as possible is the following: Manufacturing a cutting tool with a shank diameter of only 15 mm can create a large radius of 500 mm.

The reason this is important is because it greatly increases the overall machining area, helping reduce cycle times and higher step-over rates without altering scallop heights. It not only allows users to create great surface finishes, but also diminishes tool degradation because it uses a larger surface area of the tool.

Besides increasing the machining area and reducing tool wear, the new strategy can protect users from suffering annoying deviations from spindle growth or heat warping.

Comparison of MAXX Machining with a Conical Barrel Against a Standard Ball Nose

At a recent technical seminar in the United Kingdom, a comparison demonstration took place to test the surface finish performance of the MAXX Machining strategy. The setting was the Mazak Technical Centre. The machine was the Mazak i-400 multi-tasking machine tool. The cutting tools were supplied by Quickgrind.

The contest was between a ball nose tool with a 10-mm diameter and a conical barrel tool with a radius of 500 mm on a 10-mm shank. Using a small step-over strategy of 0.2 mm, the ball nose tool compared poorly with the conical barrel tool, which had a 3-mm step over. This resulted in a tool path distance of 100 m for the ball nose tool. The barrel tool, by comparison, came in at slightly less than 7 m!

The difference in machining time was even more disparate and exaggerated: 39 minutes for the ball nose tool. It only took the barrel tool three minutes!

Conical barrel cutter in hyperMILL empowers a new wave of capabilities for machine shops. (Image courtesy of OPEN MIND Technologies.)

The ability of the MAXX Machining strategy to produce a 500-mm radius can certainly be scaled up as OPEN MIND hits the drawing board with cutting tool specialists. With MAXX Machining, the key takeaway is that a larger tool radius equals a larger step down.

Imagine what machine shops could accomplish with a 1,500-mm radius tool on a shank size from 5 to 20 mm in diameter. This allows customers and users to sync up the tool radius by matching it with the accuracy of the machine tool. Simply put, this is possible because a smaller radius amplifies the inherent precision of the machine tool by stabilizing and maintaining positional tolerance without rolling over the edge. This depends of course on the level of precision in a given machine tool.

However, it also yields a simple maxim for scalable improvement using barrel tools and hyperMILL’s MAXX Machining: the larger the radius, the greater the advantage.

About the Author

Andrew Wheeler is an optimistic skeptic whose lifelong passion for computer hardware has led him to 3D printing and his latest technological passion, Reality Computing.

Figure 1. One model from the Outdoor Group’s Elite bow series. (Image courtesy of the Outdoor Group.)

Some 64,000 years ago, something groundbreaking occurred. For the first time ever, a human drew back the string of a bow and loosed an arrow into the sky. While we don’t know what that early human’s target may have been, or whether the arrow’s flight was true, we do know that shot marked a huge leap in the technological abilities of humans.

You see, making a bow and arrow isn’t the easiest thing to do. In fact, according to research published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, making a bow and arrow from scratch takes 22 raw materials, several semi-finished goods like bindings and glues and as many five separate production stages.

For early homo sapiens, the process of creating the bow and arrow was a spectacular leap into a sophisticated world of manufacturing that would follow our species through a technological evolution. Although the achievement of building the first bow was a seminal moment in history of our species, what’s most incredible is that even today the bow and arrow can be equally as challenging to make as it was an eon ago.

That’s especially true when you’re attempting to design the world’s best competition bows.

Building a Bow with Digital Manufacturing Technology

Though the technologies that drive bow-and-arrow design have changed dramatically since the weapon’s invention, this classical weapon can still be extremely complicated to manufacture today. However, with unified digital manufacturing technologies like integrated CAD, CAM and simulation, that job is becoming a bit easier. Take, for example, the case of the Outdoor Group and its goals of producing some of the finest, most shootable bows on the planet.

The Outdoor Group is a parent company of Elite Archery, Perfect Form Manufacturing, Scott Releases, Custom Bow Equipment, Duel Game Calls, Solid Broadheads and Winner’s Choice Custom Bowstrings. In an arrangement that’s similar but, undoubtedly, more sophisticated than the first bowyers, the Outdoor Group has marshalled together a number of the industry’s finest firms to collaborate and cooperate on the development of its bows.

As you imagine, cobbling together that many disparate entities can be a challenge—and the Outdoor Group’s lead engineer, Mike Derus, agrees. “In launching a new product development organization that is tasked with integrating the product designs of our subsidiaries into a unified effort, we needed a robust yet easy-to-use development platform,” Derus explained. After testing a number of CAD options, Derus and his team chose Dassault Systèmes’ SOLIDWORKS to bring the workforce together. Here’s why:

First off, a unified platform like SOLIDWORKS allows all of the Outdoor Group’s subsidiaries to work in harmony using the same tools and design validation methods as one another. Second, with a set of unified models in place, designers would be able to create bow-and-arrow systems built around each company’s already-proven designs. All an engineer would need to do is examine a previous model and reference any fasteners or joints where two or more components would come together.

To prove that point, the Outdoor Group has reported a 50-percent reduction in design cycle time and an annual revenue growth of more than 30 percent since it first adopted SOLIDWORKS in 2010.

Figure 2. Two of the many components that outfit the Outdoor Group’s Elite Bows. (Image courtesy of the Outdoor Group.)

Finally, because of SOLIDWORKS’ strong integration with CAM tools like MasterCAM, designers don’t have to wait for machinists or tooling engineers to come back to them with the bad news that their part is either impossible to manufacture or just too expensive to build. Now, engineers can use tools built into SOLIDWORKS to validate whether a design can be made. By laying down tool paths and configuring feed and speeds, engineers can gain insight into the manufacturability of their ideas. Not only can that insight help designers; it can also aid the end user as well.

“The combination of SOLIDWORKS and MasterCAM enables us to take advantage of a totally automated manufacturing environment,” said design engineer Dan Kelly. “We’ve reduced our manufacturing setup times by 50 percent and improved the quality of our machined parts, both in terms of industrial design and ergonomics.”

Manufacturing Certainty Can Buoy Product Promises

Aside from being able to reduce production times and cut manufacturing costs through the use of CAD and CAM tools, the Outdoor Group has also realized another benefit of digital manufacturing. Because of its extensive use of digital simulation tools, the Outdoor Group has been able to extend a fully transferable, lifetime warranty to its customers for its products.

“With SOLIDWORKS Simulation Professional software we can validate and even optimize design performance,” Derus said. “By using simulation to prototype and refine our bow designs, we simply make a better bow. Elite bows are designed for reliability, which is why we can offer our no-questions-asked lifetime warranty.”

Building a technically sophisticated piece of machinery has always been a difficult prospect. In fact, if something is technically sophisticated, there’s a good chance that it’s going to take some clever engineering and design to make that system work properly.

Fortunately for designers today, they don’t have to spend the millennia that their forebears did to make progress. Today, engineers and designers have sophisticated CAD, CAM and simulation tools that allow deep insight into a design’s flaws and strengths before a real-world object is ever produced. That saves valuable time, plain and simple.

Because of digital manufacturing, technological innovation in all manner of products can be accelerated. That’s not only better for bow-and-arrow makers, it’s better for humanity as a whole and it will likely set an entirely new pace for innovation.

About the Author

Kyle Maxey is a mechanical designer and writer from Austin, TX. He earned a degree in Film at Bard College and has since studied Mechanical and Architectural drafting at Austin Community College. As a designer Kyle has had vast experience with CAD software and rapid prototyping. One day he dreams of becoming a toy designer.

Today, we have computer numerical control (CNC) to make our parts not only much faster but virtually the same every time. One machine can use parts from just about any similar machine. They are interchangeable. But not everything needs to be made of metal. Plastic is cheaper and easier to work with. Many devices have switched over to plastic parts.

Designing plastic parts is a little different from designing metal parts. There are many things that must be carefully considered and planned for. Plastic parts can be made in many ways: injection molding, thermoforming, extrusion, blow molding, even casting. For the sake of brevity, this article will focus on one type: injection molding. If you’ve ever built a plastic model kit, you’ve seen and know at least something about injection molding. It is a process where heated (molten) plastic is squirted (injected) into a cavity of a designed shape (the mold) and, once cooled, ejected out as a plastic part.

Most molds are made of two sides. One will describe the outside features of the desired part. This is called the “cavity.” The other describes the inside features and is called the “core.” Most molds pull open one side and leave the other stationary in the molding machine. Parting lines generally refer to a line that is visible where the mold halves open (see Figure 1). Another aspect of parting lines is that they are where you will most often see the difference in draft angles from each mold half.

Figure 1. Parting lines are where the mold opens and closes. You can see the draft angles there. (All images courtesy of author.)

What is a draft angle? To get a part out of the mold, all of the walls in the mold are set at an obtuse angle. That way, as the mold opens, the walls separate from the part rather than scraping along its length. Think of a Tom Collins glass. It is usually tall, with straight sides. If you made a mold with straight sides like that, the part would be harder to get out of the mold because friction would act all the way up the wall. Now think of a red, plastic party cup. The sides are angled, and they stack into each other—a really good example of draft. You can pull a cup out of the plastic sleeve because the angle on the walls eliminates contact with the walls next to them as soon as you start pulling. This is effective use of draft.

If you look closely at most injection-molded parts, you will find a little spot. Often it is raised above the surface it’s on. Sometimes it is sunk below. That spot is called an injection gate (see Figure 2). It is at this place that the molten plastic entered the closed mold. (It has to get in somewhere!) When you broke or cut a piece of your model kit free off the runner (the plastic tree all the parts came joined to), you were in fact trimming the injection gate.

Figure 2. The injection gate is where the molten plastic enters the mold.

A model kit is a good example of a “family mold.” This is a system of runners that connect multiple parts. Many times, you will find a small, shiny circle on the surface of a plastic part. Chances are it’s an ejector pin mark. Ejectors help to push parts out of the mold cavity. Sometimes, you’ll see several located all around the part. Larger parts frequently need more ejector.

With metal work, there are many ways of producing a part. You can take a billet (essentially a hunk) of metal and remove material until you have what you want. This is called machining. You can also cast molten metal into a shape. Both of these methods will yield a fairly homogenous grain structure. That means the part will be just as strong (or weak) in one direction as another.

The theoretical strength of the material will be uniform (more or less). If, however, you forge the metal, you force it into shapes. You can fold it (as blade makers do) and create flow lines and boundaries within the metal. Flow lines make for stronger parts because they add structure to the material. Plastic is the same.

When the molten plastic flows into a mold, any surface it contacts will be cooler than the plastic. This makes the plastic cool and harden. As the flow front progresses, the now less-viscous plastic is pulled and stretched along to fill the rest of the mold. Because these flow lines go around and over features, their resulting structure changes the way force will act in the part. Think of it this way—if you built a floor by just stretching a piece of wood over a hole, how strong would it be? But, if you built joists and all the associated structure that a floor needs, you would expect it to be very strong. Flow lines work in the same way.

Of course, all is not flowers and sunshine in the world of plastics. There are things that you must carefully plan to avoid. Those same flow lines that add structure to your part can also add knit lines (or weld lines). These are places where the plastic flows around something, like a hole. On the opposite side, the two flow fronts meet and weld together (theoretically). Not only will this be visible (possibly an aesthetic issue) but weaker than the surrounding material.

Everyone knows stress is bad for you. It can be worse for your plastic parts. If your plastic has sharp transitions and edges, stress will be concentrated there. When a force is applied, that’s where your part will fail. Avoid stress concentrators whenever possible.

If your part is an enclosure, you will want to build in ribs and other features to give the walls strength. But be careful how you do that. If you have an outside wall thickness of, say, 0.1 in and you run a rib into it that is also 0.1 in, you’re going to have an area at the intersection that is quite a bit thicker than the wall thickness. This will cause a drop-off of pressure as the mold fills, and you will get a sink (see Figure 3). That’s where the plastic cools slower than surrounding material and shrinks more. This pulls the plastic into the center of the thick area and away from the mold, which weakens the part. When the part pops out of the mold, there will be a visible depression.

Figure 3. Sinks occur when cross-sections are too thick and the plastic shrinks as it cools.

Another thing to look out for is the short shot where the plastic does not fully fill the mold. This can be caused by overly rapid cooling, not enough pressure, overly complicated flow paths, etc. Most parts need vents to eliminate air pockets that get trapped in the mold and can cause short shots or burn marks. The vent gives the air a way out.

The most insidious and difficult thing to watch out for and design around in your parts is the undercut. This is an area or feature in your part that keeps your part from coming out of the mold. Sometimes you want an undercut. A snap is a good example. But how you get that undercut makes all the difference between a good feature and a bad part that sticks in the mold. There are many ways to create undercuts that make for good parts, but space here is limited.

There are master’s degree programs for plastic-part design and injection molding in particular. Covering every aspect in a single article is just not possible. Needless to say there is a LOT more to it. If you are interested in plastic-part design or injection molding, you can browse the Internet or your local college. There are also industry groups that specialize in the topic. Get into it. It’s a great way to do business!

About the Author

Michael Hudspeth has been a designer for two decades, a lifelong artist, an avid model builder and author (specializing in science fiction). He, his wife, two daughters and one too many cats thrive in the great American heartland, just outside of St. Louis, Missouri.

I was in Dallas a few weeks back and I ran into an engineer named Jared Aurich. Jared, his father, Dale, and a host of other employees have seemingly bucked the odds. Since the mid-1980s, when manufacturing jobs were fleeing the country, the Aurich’s and their team have been steadily growing a manufacturing business in Prescott, Arizona.

How’s that possible?

Well, it might boil down to the fact that the Aurichs have maintained a common sense approach to hiring (though it probably goes against the grain of most firms), and they’ve always been flexible about the projects in which they’ll engage.

AMFM’s Story

AMFM’s manufacturing floor.

In 1984, Dale Aurich founded Advanced Metal Fabrication and Machine (AMFM). Since its inception, AMFM has been a hands-on engineering shop that won’t shy away from any project. With that attitude driving their vision, AMFM is now capable of providing an entire suite of services to clients, including anything from helping designers engineer a product, to mass manufacturing custom components or sheet metal parts and nearly everything in between. Equipped with a 35,000-square-foot facility filled with CNC mills and lathes, sheet metal bending machines, welders and more, AMFM can manufacture a wide variety of product.

Over AMFM’s thirty-year history, Dale and his team have worked across a wide range of industries and with some of the largest companies in the world. In that time, his team has developed a deep skill set that gives them great insight into how to effectively engineer products. But the way that AMFM has been able to cultivate that skill set has been almost as important as having it in the first place.

As Jared put it to me, “Usually the kind of people we look for are the kind of people that have a mechanical aptitude as a talent. You have a lot of people who are engineers because they went to school for it, and then you have some people who just think that way.” Jared continued, “What we’ve found is if you hire someone who has good mechanical aptitude and a talent for it you can really train them to work anywhere in the shop, and they’ll take off and do a really great job.”

Though AMFM’s hiring policy makes sense, the reason it’s most effective is that it represents that beginning of a thread that guides their entire design process. Jared continued, “Because my team and I have an intuitive understanding of manufacturing, and we’ve been making parts successfully for so long, we can look at a part and, in many cases, tell our clients that we can help you make this part more effectively and for a lower cost if we change a few features or do it like this. The most fascinating thing is that often times we’re able to hand our clients a part that’s better than the original.” In the end, emphasizing manufacturability is very important and having staff on hand that have a deep understanding and intuition about that principle is extremely valuable.

Two Projects—A Study in Flexibility

Aside from having a team that knows what they’re doing, AMFM has also been successful because it isn’t afraid to take on any project. While in Dallas, Jared showed me two projects that were being exhibited by AMFM at the SOLIDWORKS World Product Showcase, and both examples demonstrated the flexibility that’s made AMFM successful.

The first project Jared introduced to me was a helicopter flight simulator. “We had a client come in and tell us that they were interested in expanding their flight school, and developing a platform that provided more realism for their simulators,” he said.

After listening to their client and finding out that their current simulators weren’t much more than a PC running flight simulation software and a few simulated controls, the AMFM crew knew just what they’d have to deliver—a realistic helicopter cab and controls coupled with a suite of monitors for displaying the graphical simulation.

A few weeks later, AMFM took delivery of a crashed Robinson R-22/R-44 helicopter cab that was provided by their client. Immediately Jared and his team went about reverse engineering the salvaged cabin. “It’s not just the look of the cab that was important to us. We reverse engineered everything, including the helicopter’s controls so that the simulator controls would function just like the original,” he said.

Using SOLIDWORKS, Jared and his team took detailed measurements and began developing a model for a tube frame, the seating, the controls and nearly every other component for the simulator. Once their model was complete, plans were shipped to the shop floor and manufacturing set out to do its work.

From the time Jared and his team were contacted by their client to the moment they took delivery of their simulators, AMFM used nearly all of their manufacturing processes to build a machine made up of more than 200 parts. Astoundingly, all of the design and manufacturing work was completed in 16 weeks.

Coming back down to Earth, Jared showed me what’s been dubbed the Swiss Army Knife of camp trailers. AMFM’s camp trailer was inspired by Jared’s own desire for a cheap, compact and mobile camp trailer.

Since he was young Jared’s been involved with the Boy Scouts. Anyone who’s ever been on a scout camping trip knows the importance of having a well-made trailer. Out in the woods a trailer is home base. It’s where you store and cook your food, it can be a shelter from the blistering heat, it can be anything that a scout needs it to be.

Jared’s lifetime involvement with the Boy Scouts gives him appreciation for the importance of having a well-made trailer for transporting camping supplies. The problem was, Jared didn’t see a solution on the market that was affordable, could be stored away neatly in a garage and be lightweight enough to be pulled by a small car.

With only their imaginations driving their design, Jared sat down at his workstation and began putting together a model. “It was actually a really cool process,” he recalled. “Once I started building the model, other people started coming over and giving me feedback. People were saying we should add this, or we can make that function also do this. Basically, everybody had their input and eventually a go-go gadget trailer emerged.”

Today, Jared and his team are still hitting the outdoors with their trailer in tow, and the design process for the trailer is ongoing. “The trailer is still evolving,” he said.

Left: Completed Helicopter simulator Right: Replicated cabin production articles

Because of the deep interests that everyone on the AMFM team, be they design engineers or machinists, have for the trailer, everyone knows exactly how and why each and every component is made. With that knowledge, Jared says his team can take an order for a completely customized trailer and have it out the door in a few days.

In the end, Jared and his team succeeded in creating an extremely well-designed trailer that’s got enough bells and whistles to accommodate any scout’s interests. That’s no exaggeration either. AMFM’s trailer can be dining table and a kitchen. It can carry a kayak or bikes. It’s got myriad places to store a water supply or hang lanterns. In short, it’s an amazing trailer.

In addition to its more esoteric projects, AMFM is also in the business of making custom components that are more routine. Whether it’s a customized fastener, a radial bracket, a bike frame component or even a customized motorcycle wheel, AMFM’s team pours all of its expertise into each of its projects regardless of what they might be.

While it might be true that American manufacturing will never reach the same position of prominence that it once commanded during the middle of the twentieth century, there’s still opportunity to regrow a vital part of the U.S. economy that’s desperately lacking. One promising solution is packaged in AMFM’s manufacturing philosophy. Hire the people you think will be versatile and nimble across your business, and be open to every manufacturing opportunity. If more upstart manufacturers would adopt this tack, the manufacturing landscape in the U.S. might just change for the better.

About the Author

Kyle Maxey is a mechanical designer and writer from Austin, TX. He earned a degree in Film at Bard College and has since studied Mechanical and Architectural drafting at Austin Community College. As a designer Kyle has had vast experience with CAD software and rapid prototyping. One day he dreams of becoming a toy designer.

So, What’s Driving This Change in Contract Manufacturing?

One of the biggest barriers preventing access to manufacturing has been the overhead cost required to assess how a part can be manufactured. Today, a number of companies in the United States have taken it upon themselves to develop online technology that can quickly evaluate 3D geometry, provide near instantaneous quotes and also deliver manufacturability assessments for almost any part. Moreover, these same companies have also equipped themselves with the machines necessary to rapidly fulfill orders using both additive and subtractive manufacturing methods.

In the past, if a design firm needed a short-run manufacturing contract, they were often sidelined by larger players looking to make thousands if not millions of parts. What was more demoralizing was the fact that even if they could get a manufacture to consider their project, it was often too expensive to pursue their plans under a mass-manufacturing paradigm.

But today, this next generation of contract manufacturers has provided an infrastructure for anyone, regardless of how complex or how few parts they need, to enter into the world of advanced manufacturing.

So, who are these manufacturing movers and shakers? Let’s look at a couple of industry leaders.

With Proto Labs, Manufacturing Reemerges in the Midwest

Minnesota’s Proto Labs (an evolution of Protomold) was founded in 1999. At the time, the company’s founder Larry Lukis was frustrated with the high costs and long lead times that came packaged with the injection molding practices of the day.

Finding that system simply untenable, Lukis, a self-described computer nerd, had the idea that manufacturing could be made cheaper and more accessible if the process of diagnosing how a part should be manufactured could be automated by software.

Fast forward some 15 years, and Proto Labs has grown to a manufacturing powerhouse that supports both plastic and metal additive manufacturing, machining and, of course, injection molding. Most importantly, Proto Labs has stayed true to its original idea of making all aspects of manufacturing cheaper and easier to access through automation.

But how’s that work?

To begin the Proto Labs journey, users are asked to define whether they’d like a part made using additive manufacturing, machining or injection molding. Once a manufacturing solution has been selected, users need to create a Proto Labs account. After an account’s been established, users are directed to their dashboard, where they can select if they’d like to build a project in plastic or metal. With a category of materials selected, users can select the exact type of metal or plastic that meets their project’s design requirements. If the right material has not been selected, Proto Labs will also connect clients with in-house design engineers that can help users make the right material decision.

With material selection out of the way, it’s time to upload 3D geometry. With a simple click, files can be added to a user’s dashboard and sent out for a quote. If the geometry in a 3D file can’t be manufactured true to form, Proto Labs’ algorithms will identify problematic regions and return those results to the client. However, if all is well with a project’s geometry, then it’s time to hit submit and let Proto Labs’ technology do its work.

Figure 1 A CAM Gear in milled in 4140 by Proto Labs. Check out that amazing finish.

Now, while that may seem like a bunch of steps to take before getting a quote, it actually only takes a matter of minutes. Most amazingly, within a few short hours, a quote for your part shows up in your email, and if you accept it, it’s likely that your project will find its way to a production machine in a matter of hours. So, depending on your shipping choice, you could have your part in hand in as little as 24 hours.

How can I know this?

Well, Proto Labs allowed me to take their service for a spin. After uploading my part—a tiny 18-mm gear for a scale model of a Howell V-Twin engine I was given a very reasonable quote ($237.73) and decided to send it off for production. Within 36 hours, I had a perfectly finished gear, milled in 4140 steel in hand.

Obviously, I was impressed. Not only was my gear true to its model’s geometry, it was produced rapidly and for the right cost and used state-of-the-art technology to both process and manufacture my project.

Xometry Blends the Best of the Web with Advanced Manufacturing

Newer to the scene, but by no means behind, is Maryland’s Xometry. Founded in 2013, Xometry also leverages automation to democratize advanced manufacturing. Stocked with PhDs and a team with years of experience developing industry-leading Web platforms, Xometry prides itself on the simplicity of its user interface. What’s more, Xometry also boasts powerful technology that makes part quoting and manufacturability diagnosis quick and, in some cases, instantaneous.

When I tried out Xometry’s service, I found it incredibly easy to use. The process for quoting and ordering a part couldn’t be any simpler.

To begin with, the Xometry experience requires that a user account be established. Once your credentials are straightened away, users are presented with an interface where files can be uploaded one, or several, at a time. With all required files uploaded to Xometry’s service, users must select between CNC or several different flavors of additive manufacturing. Once a manufacturing method has been chosen, a material must be selected as well as a finish, if desired. With all of those facts entered into Xometry’s system, a user only needs to apply those attributes to a part and then hit “Request Quote.” If possible, Xometry’s algorithms will give an immediate quote for additive manufacturing; however, for CNC operations, a quote will take a few hours.

Figure 2 Primary and Secondary Cam Gears printed in 17-4 Stainless by Xometry

For my purposes, I chose to print two separate gears for the same Howell V-Twin. One of the gears was identical to the example machined by Proto Labs, and the other was another gear that fit within the same engine. After following the five-minute process that I described above, by selecting to print the gears in 17-4 stainless steel, sans

finishing, I was presented with a quote immediately (both parts were $267.12 in total). With a simple click, I was whisked to a payment-processing platform and my order was away. Within a few days, I received my gears in the mail. Again, Xometry’s printed model was identical to the original 3D models—another short-run, contract manufacturing success.

What’s the Take Away?

In the end, whether you’re choosing Proto Labs, Xometry or another contract manufacturing firm, the bottom line remains the same, contract manufacturing has made the business of prototyping, short-run production or even mass manufacturing a realistic option for designers on any budget.

What’s most spectacular about both of these new manufacturing platforms is that they’re incredibly simple to use and their order turnaround times are without comparison. If you’re an engineer looking to get parts made for live design reviews or for short-run engineering applications, both Proto Labs and Xometry should be your first stops.

Simply put, innovation just got easier, with the barriers to manufacturing now surmounted by Proto Labs and Xometry. What’s to stop engineers from developing incredible products?

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For more information on these two services, please visit their websites.

• Proto Labs
• Xometry

About the Author

Kyle Maxey is a mechanical designer and writer from Austin, TX. He earned a degree in Film at Bard College and has since studied Mechanical and Architectural drafting at Austin Community College. As a designer Kyle has had vast experience with CAD software and rapid prototyping. One day he dreams of becoming a toy designer.

According to Gabe Enright, a technical marketing specialist at Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS, since its first release, the company has been devoted to creating a robust MCAD tool with a strong application program interface (API). This has allowed for third parties to develop embedded applications that expand the MCAD package’s capabilities via a Partner Product Program.

One excellent example of how this program has bolstered the package’s abilities is the proliferation of Gold-status partners offering full-blown CAM applications.

How Does the Partner Product Program Work?

The SOLIDWORKS Partner Product Program involves three phases, beginning with the “Research Associate” level.

To become a Research Associate, a third-party group must undergo a review with SOLIDWORKS’ partnership program leaders. On the SOLIDWORKS website, there is an online application available for potential partners to submit their intent to join the program, this includes the execution of the Partner Program Agreement which provides terms for use of the SOLIDWORKS licenses for product development. Upon receipt of the completed application, the Partner Program conducts a thorough review of the application, as well as the business. Once approved, a Research Associate will receive a copy of the latest version of SOLIDWORKS software, access to the SOLIDWORKS API and several sources for partnership support. With all of those assets in place, a Research Associates is required to have a functional product developed and released to the market within 24 months.

If a Research Associate team successfully develops an application, they are eligible to become a “Solution Partner.” A Solution Partner is expected to have shipped a SOLIDWORKS-compatible product and possess at least two references who can attest to the value of the product. If those two criteria are met, a Solution Partner will have their product listed in the SOLIDWORKS Partner Directory and receive special SOLIDWORKS marketing opportunities. In addition, all websites and products have the option of being branded with a SOLIDWORKS Solution Partner logo.

The pinnacle of the SOLIDWORKS Partner Product Program is the “Certified Gold Product” status. To attain a Gold label, the third party must have passed through both the Research Associate and Solution Partner levels and have released a fully-integrated and interoperable product. In addition, the applicant must also have five SOLIDWORKS customer references and undergo a software design review by SOLIDWORKS engineers. Similar to the Solution Partners, these applications will be identified by Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS as a Certified Gold Product in the online SOLIDWORKS Partner Directory and will have the option of being branded as such. Finally, Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS will notify all value-added resellers of the product.

The simple fact that Certified Gold Partners are fully integrated with SOLIDWORKS is a big deal. The Partner Program hosts a full range of Certified Gold Products in several categories and domains (e.g. simulation, design, manufacturing, data management, etc.) The CAM domain is one that “lives close” to CAD and there has been a growing demand over the years for seamless user access to CAM. First, full integration means that user workflows are straightforward and make sense within the SOLIDWORKS UI. Furthermore, full integration means that designers don’t have to learn a completely new interface language in order to be productive. By leveraging SOLIDWORKS’ well-crafted UI productivity, CAM learning curves can be optimized, even for users with little or no experience with CAM.

What Gold CAM Applications Are Available?

So, what options are available for SOLIDWORKS users looking to license a Certified Gold or Certified CAM application for SOLIDWORKS? Well, there are many.

1.       BobCAD-CAM for SOLIDWORKS

BobCAD’s SOLIDWORKS application offers fully integrated support for 2- to 5-axis milling and turning.  BobCAM also includes machining wizards to simplify toolpath creation, an automatic g-code generator, a virtual simulation engine and fully customizable post processors.

2.       CG CAM-TOOL

CG CAM-TOOL boasts a user-friendly interface, high-precision and high-efficiency machining strategies, a mounting tool and holder database and a flexible post processor setting. Although it might not be widely used in the United States, CG CAM-TOOL is the most commonly used CAD/CAM tool in Japan.

3.       Mastercam for SOLIDWORKS

Mastercam’s SOLIDWORKS application is a multi-axis tool that comes with the company’s reliable feature-based machining capabilities, including the ability to automatically program holes, pockets and contours. In addition, Mastercam provides toolpath associativity that stores all toolpath data directly in the source SOLIDWORKS file.

4.       OPTICAM

OPTICAM is a highly automated CAM solution that uses feature recognition technology to automate wire EDM machining.

5.       CAMWorks

CAMWorks can claim the fact that it is the first fully integrated CAM solution for SOLIDWORKS. Like many advanced CAM products, CAMWorks uses feature-based machining strategies to automate milling and turning processes. It also features high-speed machining strategies to improve milling efficiency.

6.       VisualMILL for SOLIDWORKS

VisualMILL prides itself on being an affordable CAM solution that provides support for 2.5- to 5-axis mill programming. In addition to its relatively low price, the software also comes complete with free post processors, thereby simplifying g-code translation for multi-machine operations.

7.       hyperMILL for SOLIDWORKS

hyperMILL is a multiaxis machining platform that comes equipped with hole and pocket feature recognition technology. With its ability to program both milling and turning strategies in a single operation, hyperMILL is used across a number of high-performance engineering industries—including the mold, automotive and aerospace sectors—throughout Asia, Europe and North America.

8.       PathFinder3D

PathFinder3D is unique among SOLIDWORKS Gold CAM solutions. Unlike other applications, PathFinder3D has carved out a space in the custom cabinetry, furniture, luxury yacht and motor home markets in which CAM is used. PathFinder3D includes advanced feature recognition tools and the ability to automatically update tool paths as models are reconfigured in SOLIDWORKS.

9.       SolidCAM

SolidCAM is a multi-axis CAM tool featuring a “Technology Wizard” that can guide users through a milling project to optimize production. With the ability to run anywhere from two to three times faster and deeper than other CAM products, SolidCAM has prided itself on developing state-of-the-art milling techniques. In addition, SolidCAM offers a complete CAM simulation package that includes visualization of parts, stocks, tooling, cutters and even the machine that will execute the work.

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The SOLIDWORKS Partner Product Program has been a huge boon for the MCAD leader, giving users multiple options for an integrated CAM solution. Not only has it added expanded abilities to the software package, it’s also helped the SOLIDWORKS development team stay focused on their core product, a robust MCAD modeler.

Even so, it’s becoming more obvious that the CAD industry as a whole is moving toward integrated CAD-CAM solutions as the standard model for digital manufacturing suites, and that’s excellent news for everyone. With integrated CAD-CAM solutions, designers won’t have to worry about buying multiple licenses for two separate CAD and CAM solutions. What’s more, there won’t be disconnects between incompatible files. The most important aspect of this CAD-CAM union, however, might be the fact that companies will be able to rely on their designers to adopt roles as CAM engineers while saving time and money on projects.

About the Author

Kyle Maxey is a mechanical designer and writer from Austin, TX. He earned a degree in Film at Bard College and has since studied Mechanical and Architectural drafting at Austin Community College. As a designer Kyle has had vast experience with CAD software and rapid prototyping. One day he dreams of becoming a toy designer.

The education system can be slow to adopt technology used in the real world. Blame it on funding, tenure, legacy, bureaucracy or whatever you wish. Just don’t be surprised to see outdated hardware running outdated software in the halls of academia.
“One of the challenges with having access to engineering software is identifying what software is even available to the university or how invaluable it is to your career,” said Fatima Alleyne, research and general engineer at the United States Department of Agriculture. “As a student, I didn’t understand the scope of using CAD, C++ or simulation as a tool for my engineering career.”
Like Alleyne, many students may not get exposed to the most useful technology. Or the importance of the technology may be downplayed if covered in one week within a four-year degree. However, there is a lot of computer technology out there that engineers will need knowledge of when they walk into their new jobs. To help fill in the gaps, here are some engineering software suggestions for students from practicing engineers.

Data Analysis: Excel, MATLAB, Mathematica

“Features of Excel have been quite useful for me with creating charts and figures for my research,” said Alleyne. “I think it’s important for children in middle school and high school to learn the great features that Excel has. Or they can even learn how to use MATLAB for features that Excel is unable to facilitate. It would have been useful to me while I was in grad school.”
Alleyne has a great point; however, from personal experience, I will add that universities need to focus on this software as well. When I was a grad student, many of the engineering undergrads I taught as a TA had never touched Excel, let alone MATLAB or Mathematica. I found myself ensuring that my lesson plans reinforced what was taught in lecture through hands-on Excel computations. This ensured that the students learned to use the spreadsheet, which has inadvertently become universally used by engineers (it was invented for business).
During an assignment, a student asked his father, an engineer, for help. The student’s father showed him a new way to tackle the problem—one with which I was unfamiliar—and the student shared it wit me. The new method used a pivot table. I never knew pivot tables existed myself, and I had been diving into Excel for almost a decade. That method was instrumental to my future projects. Just goes to show the importance of continual education and why universities need to ensure that the “basics” like Excel aren’t taken for granted.

If no Program Fits the Task, Make one with C, C++ or Something Similar

Excel, MATLAB and Mathematica may not solve certain engineering problems, such as data collection and analysis or machine control. In this case, a custom application would have to be created. Enter high level programming languages.
The question often posed by students is: “which programming language to focus on?” The answer can be a bit complicated.
Learning fundamental programming concepts and structure is far more important than the syntactical idiosyncrasies of a particular language. Learning how to code in one language will make it much easier to pick up a second language, then a third. So a language like BASIC or Turing might be a good option for a novice just starting to program, as they are designed to help the programmer learn. However, these languages are not that practical in the engineering world. If you have, or hope to gain, experience programming, then a more powerful language like C, C++ or Fortran (yes, it is still in use) might be a better option down the line.

Statistics and Design of Experiments

Tools like Excel, MATLAB and Mathematica are useless if you don’t understand basic statistics, linear algebra and calculus. Of those three mathematic disciplines, statistics education is often lacking in an engineering curriculum. This is a particular shame because statistics also open the door to more advanced engineering concepts such as optimizations and design of experiments (DOE).
The ability to explore a product’s design space with a tool like modeFRONTIER can accelerate the design iteration process, bring the product’s development cycle to a minimum and help find solutions that humans couldn’t find on their own.
“DOE is important because it is a very useful method for understanding the influence of input parameters of a multidimensional system on its output(s), as well as the interaction between the input parameters,” said Oren Lever, principal engineer at Gas Technology Institute. “Moreover, DOE rolls in statistics, which is essential in getting prediction and confidence limits.”
Oren also noted that failing to teach DOE will lead to other gaps in knowledge of tools used by engineers, such as:

• Response surface models
• Interpolation
• Statistical robustness
• Selecting parameter combinations

Computer Aided Design (CAD)

“One area the schools do a fair amount of teaching in is CAD,” said Kyle Koppenhoefer, principal at AltaSim Technologies, LLC. “Those classes have morphed into teaching AutoCAD, SOLIDWORKS or similar software. The students do learn these fairly well and then have to transfer that knowledge to other packages in the industry.”
Unfortunately, drafting in engineering curricula is often limited to 2D sketches and drawings—certainly a dated practice. Universities would do well by their students if they focused more on 3D modeling. Stuart Brown, managing partner of Veryst Engineering, noted that there are many benefits to 3D CAD; benefits realized when engineers transfer CAD knowledge to other applications.
He explains that engineers can use CAD information while they use various other tools ranging from simulation (computer aided engineering (CAE)), to computer aided manufacturing (CAM). He said, “What I think will happen now is greater linkage and greater connection between the engineer and manufacturing codes. The ability to not only prototype the part but also understand its properties so you remove the iterative step of making and testing. You can make something that works the right way the first time.”

Think Outside the Engineering Wheelhouse: CAM and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

Not many engineers get to step in a machine shop these days. This can lead to quite a lot of confusion when workplace collaboration with the machine shop is necessary. But the same can likely be said about the sales office, the management office and even the marketing office. It can be tricky for engineers to step outside their comfort zones to work well with their corporate teams.
To help alleviate this problem, engineers would do well to learn from some product data/lifecycle management (PDM or PLM) and CAM software. The former will ensure that the team will all be on the same page, the latter will ensure that your designs are manufacturable.
Edward Lopategui, engineer, author, CEO and founder of RevVision, said that CAM and PLM are relatively non-existent in engineering curricula. He then added that, “CAM is important just to understand producibility — how things are tooled and reliably built at scale. That every edge and hole has a consequence and cost associated with it that may not be ideal.”
Lopategui further explained that “PLM is important in understanding team think — engineering increasingly is not a one man show, but many working in concert to create very complex products where ideas are not bound by imagination, but cost, schedule, supply chain, regulation and other factors, most of which are wholly outside an engineer's purview. Finding ways to efficiently map those external limitations to a design process and to coordinate those efforts among many is critical for modern design.”

Simulation: Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computation Fluid Dynamics

Students will spend a lot of time focusing on the theoretical physics, but these can often be impractical in the real world. After all, your designs will look quite different than a free body diagram. In fact, FEA can be instrumental when a free body diagram is statistically indeterminate.
Udayan Kanade, CEO of Oneirix Labs and Noumenon Multiphysics, said, “Simulation is very instrumental to us for what we do. I wish it was taught better or even taught in school. Simulation software is really a mathematics software. If that was taught in a more precise fashion … after all the entire world is a partial differential equation. If all of that was taught better it would be great.”
Understanding simulation software that can actually compute these physical outcomes on complex designs is necessary for many engineers in the workforce.
“Students need less theory and more practical finite element methods,” said Kerim Genc, technical sales manager at Simpleware. “There is almost no practical level knowledge taught in undergrad, and only a little taught in grad school. Even in grad school it’s mostly theory and very little hands on education. Students need a focus on FEM in industry. That is how we get people interested: real world applications.”
Though it is important for engineers to understand the theory behind the physics they are simulating to ensure their inputs and outputs are reasonable, Genc gave a perfect example of why practicing with finite elements is so vital. He said, “Students don’t get an understanding of how the use of a model influences the final model. This is called functional creep—when you have a very complex model when all you need is a simple one. I had a friend at NASA that solved what others would see as complex problems in Excel. He said, ‘This is all I need to answer my question.’ We need to encourage students to keep their models simple.”
Genc has a point: with overly complex models there is more opportunity to break them or introduce a bug. Additionally, why have a large model with large compute times when a simple model will do the trick in a few seconds?
As for which simulation software to focus on, Jeffrey Crompton, principal at AltaSim Technologies, has some suggestions. He said, “The main pieces of [simulation] software we find that are systemic across the industry are COMSOL, Abaqus, ANSYS Icepak, Fluent. Most of the time students will get some exposure to those. We are not bothered by expertise of a specific software. We much rather them be able to demonstrate they have the capability of understanding. Using the tools is relatively straightforward due to easy GUI. The problem with that is you can easily set up the problem wrong if you don’t have the fundamentals, so you need that to ensure you set up the problem correctly.”

Too Much Math and Science?

Lopategui feels that the limitation starts with the curriculum itself. There just isn’t enough time. He said, “CAE gets some coverage, but most CAM software is also largely missing. Even most CAD software is given rather cursory coverage in most engineering curricula; limited to rudimentary modeling and drawing skills rather than meaningful techniques for efficiently approaching design intent, similar to resilient modeling philosophies. There just isn't enough bandwidth in most 4-year degree programs already saturated with math and science.”
With this time limitation in mind, Koppenhoefer believes that the focus should remain on math and science. He said, “That is largely where the universities should be. When it comes to specific pieces of software, we typically see students picking them up themselves in their masters and PhD theses. They are often learning on their own. So we would want to see more students taking classes like the ones we offer so they get up to speed. We want engineers that can look at results from the computer and say, ‘We don’t think that’s correct,’ and then move on to validation of the model.”

How to Learn Engineering Software on Your Own?

Having entered her grad studies without experiencing much engineering software, Fatima Alleyne felt lost in her post graduate studies. She knew better than the undergrads the importance of the optional courses or short, week-long sessions. But as these courses weren’t targeted to graduate students, she felt there was a barrier to taking those at that point in her student career. Perhaps it’s time to make these optional courses core courses?
Alleyne said, “I learned a lot about the different software tools available on campus through conversations with undergrads and looking through the schedule of introductory classes. I missed them as a grad student as it was aimed at undergrads. In the future, if I could relive my grad experience, I would enroll in those classes.”
However, not all is lost for Alleyne or for practicing engineers that missed the boat of engineering software on campus. She said, “While working as an engineer with the USDA I’m considering to enroll in a course online so I can learn a skillset that will be invaluable to my career.” Some online material Alleyne will be looking at is from online resources such as Coursera, i Get IT, MITx, HarvardX, as well as other courses from schools and private firms.

About the Author

Shawn Wasserman (@ShawnWasserman) is the Internet of Things (IoT) and Simulation Editor at ENGINEERING.com. He is passionate about ensuring engineers make the right decisions when using computer-aided engineering (CAE) software and IoT development tools. Shawn has a Masters in Bio-Engineering from the University of Guelph and a BASc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.