Moulds for glass bottles receive quick approval

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Step-by-step process changes with metrology addition

The first stage in a project is for Omco to input a customer's design details, which may include decoration and perhaps also lettering that has to be superimposed on a bottle's curved surface. Such bespoke data arrives as a drawing or electronically as a DXF file. Staff at the Iasi facility process this information and machines a sample of the bottle using CNC equipment such as a DMG/Mori Seiki machining centre, a Doosan lathe and a Baublys engraver. The result is a physical facsimile of the intended bottle from which an epoxy resin copy is made.

In the next step, conventional practice and the process route driven by the Nikon Metrology laser scanner diverge. Alexandru Geantă, quality manager at Omco's Iasi plant, explained the difference. “Historically, we sent the resin model to the customer for approval, most often by air due to the urgency of such projects.

However, flying a package from Romania to Argentina, for example, took eight days door-to-door and the model then had to be evaluated and passed off at the other end.”

Slashing turnaround times from weeks to a day

The manager noted that it sometimes took as much as a fortnight before the company received changes to the design along with the go-ahead to start producing moulds. “Now, we simply scan the resin facsimile from several angles on the CMM using the LC50CX mounted in a Renishaw PH10M motorised indexing head. The resulting point cloud data, an exact digital copy of the physical model, is reduced in size to around 80 MB by converting it into IGES format. This is sent electronically to the customer and can be opened on many different CAD platforms.” This cuts the turnaround to the same day, or in 48 hours at most, the manager noted.

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