It’s an old problem. Engineers struggle to create designs that are easy to manufacture. Machinists complain about receiving unworkable CAD models. But there is some good news - designers and machinists can look forward to new platforms that promise to resolve that conflict.
Bill Dieter – Industrial Designer at Terrazign.
Bill Dieter is an industrial designer at Terrazign, a company that designs products that combine textiles with hard goods. He said, “We do design to manufacturing every day, building tooling in our machine shop.”
Their machine shop houses laser cutters and water jets, CNC mills and lathes, metal bending machinery and more. As an industrial designer, Bill wanted to ensure that his tooling designs could be manufactured, but he was frustrated that he couldn’t speak the language of their various machines. “Right now we have a stupid number of programs,” he related, adding, “I would rather know one or two with a decent depth of knowledge.”
Terrazign needed to drive their machining processes directly from their design software so they selected Fusion 360 from Autodesk as a design tool earlier this year. Fusion 360 supports industrial design, CAD modeling and CAM processes on a single platform.
Bill Dieter participated at the recent Autodesk University and learned to machine parts on a Tormach personal CNC machine. Tormach sponsored a class that introduced the CAM features that are integrated with the Fusion 360 CAD tools. It also introduced things like basic machining strategies for different cutters, and which mills to use for different processes. Bill was happy with his experience, saying, “This is really easy. We had a CNC router in our shop, but it was so much more difficult to program.”
Once the basics were covered in class, Tormach invited each participant to manufacture a part using fourteen machine operations.
According to another class participant, Chris Wilson, this required no translation between the CAD and the CAM tool because it is all in one environment. “That means you can look at the machine processes and then go back to your design and revise it if the machine processes aren’t efficient,” he said.
In manufacturing, it’s rare for part designers to use and understand the basic programming language of machine tools, G-code. As a result, designers traditionally rely on machinists and production engineers to develop strategies to most effectively make the part. Bill Dieter, an experienced part designer, was on his own.
Chris Wilson commented, “[Software like this] is disrupting the status quo by giving designers, who normally don’t have access to CAM functionality, the ability to manufacture proof-of-concept designs in-house. It’s closing the gap between hobbyists and traditional production, allowing for better grassroots innovation.”
So, what happened? After a few bumps in the road, including a sheared tool, Bill and his classmates were each able to successfully program the mill to machine a brass part.
This hands-on learning environment proved to be a low-risk way to learn the value of integrated CAD/CAM.
The benefits of this integrated approach flow right through the value chain. Designers with real-world experience need fewer design iterations to reach a realistic production part, and communicate better with shop floor personnel. This leads to lower cost parts and faster time to market, as well as a better understanding of the challenges of mass production part-making.
Integrated software won’t turn designers into machinists, but it does promise to inform each person in the product development process of the impact that their decisions can have on others. And that can be a very big deal.