Ready for Some Football?

It’s time for bowl games in college football and the playoffs in the NFL, so this story caught my eye. Delcam’s Illinois office presented the latest developments in the company’s PowerMill CAM system for high-speed and five-axis machining and its FeatureCAM feature-based programming software at its annual update meeting earlier this month.

The meeting was held at Ingersoll Cutting Tools in Rockford and included live cutting demonstrations on Ingersoll’s Mori Seiki MV-65 and Toyoda UX570 CAT 40 machines.  Both demonstrations showed the machining of a metal replica football, one programmed with PowerMill and one with FeatureCAM. Recognizing the divided loyalties of the region’s Delcam customers, one was produced with a Chicago Bears theme while the other featured the Green Bay Packers.

The new release of PowerMill includes improvements to the Vortex high-efficiency area-clearance strategy, expanded collision checking to also cover near misses, and more efficient raster finishing.

Vortex produces safe toolpaths with a much deeper cut by using a controlled engagement angle that maintains the optimum cutting conditions for the whole toolpath.  As a result, higher feed rates and material-removal rates are possible, making the cutting time shorter by as much as 70 percent.  Enhancements in PowerMill 2015 will give even greater reductions in machining time with Vortex compared to conventional roughing. 

Companies using four- or five-axis machines with trunnions or similar tilting tables will benefit from new options that are now available to distribute PowerMill’s toolpath points so that the machine’s gimbal-lock position is avoided and a smoother motion results.

As well as including the latest developments in the Vortex strategy, the 2015 version of FeatureCAM incorporates a range of enhancements in three-axis milling, two-axis and five-axis drilling, turning and turn-mill, and wire EDM.