First-rate Mold Solution Co., Ltd generates an average of 200 new CNC programs every month. The company’s CNC programming productivity was limited in the past by the need to separately apply toolpaths to each of the part’s surfaces and other limitations of its previous programming software.

The company switched to new programming software that automatically recognizes features and enables the programmer to define a process for the feature that can be repeated each time a similar feature is encountered. Additional time has been saved by the new software’s improved rest machining and trochoidal milling capabilities. The result is that the company has reduced programming time for feature-intensive 2.5-D parts by 50 to 75 percent and for less feature-intensive 3-D parts by 25 percent.

First-rate Mold Solution Co., Ltd offers complete engineering and fabrication of injection molds and tooling for the plastics industry. The company’s services and capabilities include custom tool design and development; prototype and part model building; custom injection mold building; mold repair, alteration and maintenance; die building and repair; fixture and gauge building; CNC machine turnkeys; custom wire and sinker EDM work, as well as contract machining for the aerospace industry.

First-rate Mold Solution Co., Ltd supports the needs of several divisions along with a growing customer base. While they continue to see growth in new mold builds, they also do extensive revision, rebuild and maintenance for their customers. This combination requires fast reaction time to keep customers up and running. As a result, in a typical month the CNC programmers will create programs for a wide variety of mold components, many of which require up to six setups.

The vast majority of these components are produced on Mori Seiki high-speed VMCs, Mori Seiki high-speed graphite/steel machining centers, Mori Seiki high-speed HMCs and Bridgeport E-Z Trac CNC milling machines. The company also does some turning on a Mori Seiki SL-25 CNC lathe with bar feeder. According to Dave Kennedy, CNC Manager, an average of 240 programs are required each month to meet customer needs.

The majority of parts programmed by First-rate Mold Solution Co., Ltd are 2.5-D parts with many features such as holes, bosses, pockets, fillets, ribs, etc. The company also programs a considerable number of 3-D parts, which may have some features, but are primarily machined using 3-D surface profiling.

The previous software used by the company was able to import a solid model, but required the manipulation of geometry before a toolpath could be produced. The company’s programmers had to spend a considerable amount of time making modifications such as adding boundaries and filling in holes in order to define the boundaries between surfaces to avoid gouging. Programming became very tedious because so many individual surfaces had to have tools and machining parameters applied to them.