Customer Challenge
Cast Aluminum Solutions develops and manufactures industrial components, the majority of which have heating or cooling capabilities, for the global aerospace, microelectronics, medical, food service, and industrial fluid markets. CAS products are a critical element of the production process of electronic devices we use every day, the medical equipment that keeps us healthy, and the spacecraft marking pathways to tomorrow. With today’s market being highly competitive we partnered with NexGenCAM to leverage Autodesk’s PartMaker and Autodesk FeatureCAM software to remain at the pinnacle of the industry.
Project Goals
Solving complex process challenges is at the heart of everything we do. We take projects from conception, design & modeling, through prototype fabrication & performance testing, all the way to volume production. Autodesk FeatureCAM and Autodesk PartMaker are vital to providing programming capabilities for our Mori Seiki CNC lathes, Haas vertical mills, and Okuma multi-axis horizontal machine centers. Our goal is to efficiently program parts from 3D models.
Solution
At Cast Aluminum Solutions we use Autodesk FeatureCAM to program 4-axis Haas vertical mills, Brother machining centers, and Okuma 5-axis horizontal machine centers. PartMaker is used to program some operations on Mazak lathes, Mori Seiki lathes, Haas vertical mills, and Okuma horizontal machine centers. Through NexGenCAM’s continued education with Best Practice classes, we are continuing to see tremendous value in both Autodesk FeatureCAM and PartMaker.
Business Outcome
Cast Aluminum Solutions has continued to use Autodesk FeatureCam on any new projects for programming on mills. Because our products are custom designed; programming speed and quality are essential to on-time delivery and Cast Aluminum Solutions relies on Autodesk FeatureCam to perform this.
Conclusion
Effective use of existing machines requires the ability to quickly generate CNC programs for the machines with multiple types of controllers. Autodesk FeatureCAM provides this functionality. The biggest obstacle in achieving our programming goals is difficulty in being able to precisely control operation order in the machining process, and Autodesk FeatureCAM mostly recognizes the diverse geometric elements of our products. Webinar training and personal customer support provided by NexGenCAM already helped us to solve many of the challenges encountered in our programming process. We expect that further cooperation with NexGenCAM will help us to continuously improve the programming process for our CNC machines.
Project Summary
Delivery Date
2022-06-06
Project Duration
5 days
Autodesk Solutions
Fusion 360 with FeatureCAM
Services Provided
Process Automation
Strategy & Planning
Workflow Optimization
CAM Programming
Design for Manufacturing
Post Processor
Installation
Training