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The Need

Small machine / Big Parts: What can you do when your existing equipment appears to be overmatched by the manufacturing task at hand?

One of our clients, a prominent Door and Frame manufacturer obtained a small NC machine to punch door skins.  The machine, which would enhance manufacturing capacity, was available at a very attractive price.  Unfortunately, the required punching vastly exceeded the area that was addressable by the machine in both axes.  This means that it was not enough that the machine could perform repositions to reach the area that was outside the X table limit for punching.  The machine could not perform additional required punching in the ‘Y’ axis.

Octo Machine Specifications Door Dimensions Vs Table Dimensions Machine Repositioning Limitations

What We Achieved

We developed a system that automatically generated one NC program for the portion of the door that the machine could reach. Then the system perfomed a virtual rotation of the part that simulated the way the client would process the door in manufacturing.  A second NC program was then automatically generated to complete the remaining punches.

Program #1 - Everything Punched Except Hinges The system performs a virtual 180 degree part rotation Program #2 - Punch Hinges

With our system, our client was able to produce parts far larger than the machine's table dimensions, with no manual NC programming required!