Electrode software ‘triggers’ revolution at British toolmaker

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HASCO Hasenclever GmbH + Co KG

Ramada Acos

Vero Software Limited

Playing follow the leader within the software

An intuitive interface guided him through the process of creating the electrode nose, which he said makes further editing of extracted faces a simple procedure, as extension height can be added with either vertical, draft, or tangential extension. “If I want to extend the extracted faces, it’s easy to add a bit of extra draft, and then add the stock. If I’m creating a rib with stock, I can add fillets to the stock so quickly and easily to give the rib strength.”

For open-sided electrodes, he has made use of multiple extrusion directions for automatic side extension. The base and stock are interactively added, and he has been able to employ dynamic animation and collision check features at any time during the creation process. “If I’m using Erowa holders, I can pull the geometry from the database and simulate the complete burning process, eliminating any potential clashes while it’s being produced.”

Serving a range of sectors with various mould materials

Alliance Tooling produces aluminium and steel moulds for household goods, point-of-sale, garden products, the building industry, medical and dispensing products, and the automotive sector. The shop first realised it needed to improve its electrode design and manufacturing processes while building a mould for a drug-dispensing component that required a large number of electrodes, but with a short production window. As Parsons noted, “This highlighted a bottleneck with producing electrode models and sparking them.”

The Sodick AG60L 6-station tool change spark eroder overcame the sparking bottleneck, he explained. “The roughing cycle is far faster than anything we’ve seen before, and with the tool-changer we can maximise lights-out usage.” The use of Visi Electrode means Alliance has electrodes ready before they need them. “In the past, we’ve been sparking electrodes as soon as they’re available, then production stopped while we made another.” Alliance was said to have realised Visi Electrode would be perfect for keeping the Sodick fed with electrodes for sparking, but there was one further hurdle they had to overcome before their full electrode process was complete – toolpath production.

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