CAD/CAM Helps Container Systems Grow

Like many manufacturers, Container Systems (Franklinton, NC) took a heavy hit after 9/11. This thriving manufacturer of heavy duty shipping containers, boxes and specialty containers for electronics and communications equipment, as well as plywood reels for the rope and cable industries, saw the previous year’s sales of $8 million reduced to $4 million.

Today, this company is leaner and meaner, and sales are pushing toward the previous high. To stay competitive in the post 9/11 business environment, Container Systems is relying heavily on automated manufacturing with a high speed router to keep pace with increased business volume using less manpower and equipment.

In 2007, the company purchased an Accu-Router to cut reels and manufacture parts for any containers that require precision hole cutting. At the recommendation of the router manufacturer, the company also purchased Mastercam CAD/CAM software to generate programs for the router.
Scott Parsons, Vice President of Container Systems, said, “Mastercam has been a great productivity tool for us. Without it, I would be spending most of my time making drawings manually and programming the router. It’s been amazing for me.”

Parsons said that about 25% of the work volume in his business is accomplished using the router and Mastercam. After a little training in both, it took just nine months for Parsons to become very proficient with these systems. Initially, it was taking him five or six hours a day to write programs for the router. Now he spends only one or two hours a week writing new programs or tweaking existing ones. So instead of being overwhelmed with the new technology, it has given Parsons time to create more container designs and seek new business opportunities.

Today, instead of using traditional band saws, Container Systems cuts with the router. Automatic cutting is faster and more accurate. Where it used to take an hour or so to change over to a new job, the transition is almost instantaneous. “We can now change things on the fly. So if a customer calls and says, ‘hey stop running 12-inch reels, now I need 14-1/2-inch reels’, we just press a button,” he said.

Container Systems manufactures around 10,000 reels a week. There used to be 14 people working in this area. Today, with Mastercam CAD/CAM software and the router, there are only ten. In addition to making it possible to relocate four workers to other manufacturing tasks, Mastercam and the router have replaced three pieces of conventional manufacturing equipment, which are now used only to meet overflow production requirements. These include two older CNC systems that had to be programmed manually.

Parsons said, “We have 45 guys in the plant. The guys who were working on the reels just got moved to other jobs in the plant. So no jobs were lost, and we got to grow our business.”
In terms of increased productivity, Parsons said that Mastercam would pay for itself in less than a year. It is also providing a subtler dividend. He said, “Now when a potential customer comes in and sees that machine running, we show them how we can do their program on Mastercam. It’s a powerful sales tool.”

Mastercam’s Maintenance Release Delivers New Toolpaths and Enhancements for Woodworking Industry

CNC Software, Inc. announces the release of Mastercam X2 Maintenance Release 2 (MR2). Making its customer debut in September, this release is available to all Maintenance customers and all new Mastercam customers. This release introduces significant new capabilities, including new and improved toolpaths, block drill enhancements, and much more.

Saw Toolpath


	Click on the graphic above to view video.

This new 2D toolpath lets you create saw toolpaths more easily and with fewer operations than before. With the saw toolpath, you can quickly program multiple saw cuts in a single operation and easily control important parameters such as the arbor side as well as climb or conventional cutting direction.

Peel Milling Toolpath
Delivering powerful high speed cutting to 2D projects, this new toolpath moves the tool in and “peels” away material, layer by layer. It supports efficient constant climb milling by using a trochoidal type of motion with accelerated “back” feed moves when the tool is not engaged in material.

Block Drill Enhancements
You now have the option to define horizontal drilling stations in the Machine Definition as aggregates or block drill stations.

Common Edge Nesting
Common edge optimization in nesting is now supported. Nesting toolpaths so that they have common edges saves both time and money.

Onion Skin
Small parts can present a problem on a CNC router if the area of the final piece is not big enough to maintain adequate vacuum (and keep the part from moving) during a cut. Onion skinning offers an alternative to using tabs. The onion skin option is fully supported in both manual nesting and Mastercam’s Automatic Toolpathing (ATP).

Multiaxis Enhancements
Many powerful enhancements are included in the advanced multiaxis toolpaths. Examples include new “by region” machining, which allows the toolpath motion to be optimized by completing one region before moving on to another, and expanded entry and exit macros that greatly simplify contacting and leaving the material.

Additional MR2 Enhancements

The Create Boundary function greatly expands Mastercam’s toolpath boundary creation, restricting the toolpath to highly specific areas.
New techniques and options provide more sweep orientation control options, greater flexibility in the use of multiple along and cross curves, and better accuracy for matching those curves while using less data to define the resulting NURB surface.
The Operations Manager pane can now float to a different area of the graphics window or to a separate screen when you are working with dual monitors
The Level Manager can now be moved to a second monitor and left open. You can also hide all geometry except what is on the main level, or display a range of levels in the Level Manager grid.

Mastercam Delivers Powerful New CAD/CAM Tools for Woodworking Industry

CNC Software unveils the first Maintenance release for Mastercam X2 Router

CNC Software announces the release of Mastercam X2’s Maintenance Release (MR1). Available to customers in March, this release is available to all Maintenance customers and all new Mastercam customers. This release introduces significant new capabilities, including double-sided nesting, ”onion skin” cutting, viewsheets, and much more.

Onion Skin Option
Small parts can be a problem on a CNC router if the area of the final piece being produced is not big enough to maintain adequate vacuum during a cut (and keep the part from moving). Mastercam Router’s new Onion Skin option automatically adjusts the depth of the outside profile cuts so that the tool does not cut all the way through the sheet. This maintains full vacuum during the heavy cutting. Mastercam creates a separate toolpath operation for the final return cut. You can even specify a different router bit and adjust feeds and speeds for the return cut.

Double-sided Nesting
Mastercam’s double-sided nesting functionality allows the flexibility of nesting parts with front- and back-side operations. Operations can be performed on one side, and the entire sheet can then be “flipped” over to finish the parts prior to cutting them out. Double-sided nesting reduces expensive secondary operations without requiring changes in product design and construction methods.

Viewsheets
New to Mastercam, viewsheets will save time when working with multiple views or working with different levels at the same time. Viewsheets let you create different user-defined sheets consisting of the view orientation, zoom scale, and visible levels of the part. Bookmarks allow you to save a specific state inside the viewsheet and recall it later. Mastercam saves the current view orientation, zoom, and visible level information each time you move from one viewsheet to another.

Z Oscillation
Z Oscillation contour type has been added to minimize tool wear. Z Oscillation is especially useful when cutting thinner materials or laminated materials.

Mastercam X2 Introduces CAD file Change Recognition

New functionality helps automate part changes

Every shop faces part changes. Often, it can be difficult to track which version is the latest, what modifications have been made, and what programming changes are needed. Mastercam X2 includes two powerful new tools – File Tracking and Change Recognition – that give you an easy way to identify these issues and streamline programming an updated file.

Create a checklist of files to watch including Mastercam, Autocad, or other CAD files. Mastercam alerts you when a newer version of any file on the list is available.
Mastercam’s Change Recognition identifies modifications to any type of CAD geometry with no file type limitations.
Mastercam marks any toolpaths affected by the updated part file. You can quickly select the new geometry and update the toolpaths.
Once you update an affected toolpath, automatically update any additional toolpaths that use that geometry.

“The real power of these tools becomes clear when receiving changes to a part file with multiple operations,” says CNC Software Vice President Brian Summers. “Something as simple as a few additional drill holes could be frustrating to identify. Now, with a few mouse clicks, you can immediately locate and program these changes, saving valuable time,” he adds.

Mastercam X2 Delivers Increased Powerand Speed to Woodworking Industry

CNC Software unveils the next generation of its Mastercam X CAD/CAM software

Mastercam, the world’s most widely-used CAD/CAM software*, takes a leap forward with the release of Mastercam X2 Router. Building on the powerful Mastercam X platform, Mastercam X2 Router has been designed to increase machining flexibility and provide users with more programming options than ever before.

Mastercam X2 Router introduces improved automatic toolpathing (ATP). ATP imports designs from popular cabinet design packages and automatically applies your pre-defined machining strategies with just a few mouse clicks. Quickly define toolpath operations to profile around panels, drill dowel holes, or whatever your job calls for. Once you have defined your favorite strategies, you can have Mastercam ATP use specific toolpath operations on the various components from the design system.

Mastercam X2 Router also features new options to make engineering changes easier. Mastercam’s File Tracking function helps manage files by identifying files that have changed, while Change Recognition identifies specific changes in files. It can detect modifications to Mastercam, AutoCAD, and other CAD files, and can mark affected operations. Once the affected geometry is updated, you can automatically update any additional toolpaths that use that geometry.

Other Mastercam X2 features include:

Added selection tools streamline everyday programming.
New Spiral and Radial toolpaths in Mastercam’s high speed machining suite.
Quick Masks streamline the selection of common entities.
And much more.

“We are continuing to improve our Mastercam X platform of CAD/CAM software,” says CNC Software president Mark Summers. “We’ve put a lot of hard work into developing new toolpaths and features that will improve the way a machinist works. We took feedback from our users and applied them to the new Mastercam X2 software.”

Mastercam’s Maintenance Enhancements

Spotlight on Nesting

CNC Software’s latest Maintenance deliverables for Mastercam X Router CAD/CAM software provide increased functionality in many areas, as well as improvements to nesting. Mastercam’s nesting enhancements introduce significant new capabilities, improved sorting options, speed improvements, enhanced nesting reports, and much more.

Several upgrades to the sorting options have improved Mastercam’s toolpath nesting. The user now has more control over how nested parts are machined. Typically the order in which the parts are nested is the order in which they are machined. Mastercam nests larger parts first, and then fills in the remaining space with smaller parts. It also offers more features for sorting, including advanced cluster sorting.

Mastercam’s nesting reports provide users a nested sheet report and individual part information. They have been reformatted from a text-based file to a PDF report with graphics.

With the latest release of Mastercam, significant speed improvements have been obtained in certain cases by breaking the Automatically attach geometry option into two separate options. One option automatically attaches just the chains used in the toolpath cluster, while a second option includes additional geometry contained within the outer boundary of the nested part. This can greatly improve Mastercam’s nesting speed.

Other features of Mastercam’s nesting include:

Separate toolpath nesting and geometry nesting
Simplified parameter pages
Infrequently used parameters segregated on a nesting configuration dialog
Easy access to batch nesting via a toolbar button
Added ability to import multiple external MCX files into toolpath nesting
Improvements to rectangular nesting including the ability to save defaults, save scrap, and more.

Mastercam’s Latest Release Delivers Advanced Multiaxis Toolpaths and More to Woodworking Industry

CNC Software unveils latest software at Northwest Wood Expo 2006

The Northwest Woodworking Expo 2006 will showcase the latest CAD/CAM software from CNC Software, Inc. CNC will demonstrate their new Mastercam X2 release in booth # 600/602 at the Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center in Tacoma, WA on November 16-17. Scheduled for release to customers in fall 2006, Mastercam X2 adds significant new capabilities to their flagship Mastercam X CAD/CAM software, including a suite of new advanced multiaxis toolpaths, enhancements to automatic toolpathing, Mastercam X Art, improved block drilling, and much more.

New Advanced Multiaxis Toolpaths
A new engine has been added to the advanced multiaxis toolpaths. An add-on to Mastercam Router Pro, this engine provides a customized, streamlined interface that is fine-tuned to specific applications, such as 5-axis swarf cutting. Depending on what toolpath is being used, Mastercam’s parameter pages display only what is needed for that specific toolpath, greatly simplifying parameter selection.

Enhanced Block Drilling
Mastercam’s block drilling enhancements include intelligent tool selection, a new block drill definition manager, advanced filtering of duplicate geometry, and much more. Mastercam’s block drill definition manager allows complete control over the block drill layout, making it fast and easy to create a block drill definition for virtually any machine. With Mastercam’s intelligent geometry filtering, you simply choose geometry and let the software filter out entities that would create duplicate drilling operations for the same physical hole location. This advanced filtering helps to simplify the selection process and reduce programming time.

Mastercam Art
An add-on to Mastercam Router, Mastercam Art has been upgraded and integrated in the Mastercam X interface, including text menus, hot keys, toolbars, and online help. A new Art Manager tracks Art surfaces and operations. Other new additions include the ability to wrap art around a cylinder, a new toolpath that includes roughing and finishing options for the cylinder milling spiral toolpath, speed improvements, and much more.

Additional Enhancements

A new rest roughing high speed machining toolpath provides support for multiple previous operations, as well as for external STL/CAD files.
Enhanced Automatic Toolpathing (ATP) imports designs from CAD packages and automatically applies pre-defined machining strategies with fewer mouse clicks.
Modified AutoCursor function improves programming efficiency (FastPoint mode, XYZ mode).
New Toolpath Manager display options identify what geometry belongs to each operation.
User-defined feeds and speeds deliver better machining control.

Mastercam Maintenance Enhancements

Spotlight on “Block Drilling”

CNC Software’s latest Maintenance deliverables for Mastercam X Router CAD/CAM software provide increased functionality in many areas, as well as greater flexibility in block drilling. Mastercam’s block drilling enhancements introduce significant new capabilities, including advanced filtering of duplicate geometry, a new block drill definition manager, intelligent tool selection, and much more.

With Mastercam’s intelligent geometry filtering the user employs simple window selection methods, letting the software filter out entities that would create duplicate drilling operations for the same physical hole location. Using Mastercam’s new drop-down list in the Sorting dialog box, the user can determine which entities to keep and which ones to filter out. This advanced filtering helps to simplify the selection process and cut programming time.

Mastercam’s new block drill definition manager allows complete control over the block drill layout, making it fast and easy to create a block drill definition for virtually any machine. Rather than limiting customers to factory-defined machine definitions, the user, Mastercam Reseller, or a local OEM has complete access to the same tool set used to make the factory-defined machine definitions.

Mastercam also provides extra sorting of varying Z depths for block drilling geometry in order to offer more intelligent tool selection and placement. Holes of various depths may be selected at the same time, and the software will optimize the toolpath to ensure that holes with the same depth can be grouped together for block drilling operations. In addition, Mastercam will recognize the difference between through holes and blind holes. Mastercam will select the proper tool to avoid excessive tear out on through holes, and use brad-point tools for blind holes. Users have the ability to select multiple diameters and depths, which allows Mastercam to optimize the toolpath in a single, easy-to-program operation that can save hours of programming time.

Another feature of Mastercam’s block drilling is easy access for the user to enable and disable specific stations on a block drill. This provides greater toolpath control and flexibility. For more information on Mastercam’s block drilling, please visit http://www.mastercamrouter.com or contact your local Mastercam Reseller.

Mastercam X Delivers New Ease, Speed and Power to Manufacturing Industry

CNC Software unveils the next generation of its leading CAD/CAM software

Mastercam, the world’s most widely-used CAD/CAM software* takes a leap forward with the release of Mastercam X. Dramatically streamlined and featuring powerful new features, Mastercam X has been designed to reduce programmer interaction and increase machining flexibility.

“Mastercam X marks an exciting new chapter for our software,” says CNC Software president Mark Summers. “We’ve put a lot of hard work into developing new techniques that will dramatically improve the three most important areas for an NC programmer – ease and flexibility in programming any toolpath, the toolpath calculation speed, and a superior toolpath output.”

Mastercam X delivers a new, streamlined customizable interface. Specially designed to minimize user interaction while maximizing programming options, the new interface is completely customizable and can be set to each person’s specific preferences. Mastercam’s new “smart” ribbon bar further boosts efficiency and maximizes workspace by appearing only when needed, and displaying tools specific to the job at hand.

Mastercam X features a suite of new programming tools, including the powerful new Pencil Offset Finishing toolpath. This new surface machining technique extends the crisp “cleanup” of a pencil trace toolpath across an entire part by automatically sectioning the part into logical machining areas.
Mastercam X also introduces Machine and Control Definition. These are virtual descriptions of the actual machine tool and control you will use to cut a part, allowing Mastercam to automatically customize its interface based on your CNC machine. This means that Mastercam X is aware of what the machine can and cannot do, helping ensure a correctly programmed part.

CNC Software Releases Mastercam Art

New Artistic CAD/CAM Software Added to Suite of Mastercam Products

Mastercam, the world leader in CAD/CAM software, announces its much anticipated Mastercam Art CAD/CAM software, bringing its power and experience to artistic relief design and cutting. Mastercam Art allows you to bring 2D sketches, clip art, photos, and CAD files to life by crafting them on-screen and cutting them with easy, specialized toolpaths. What would have taken a signmaker or other artisan weeks to do can now be done in minutes.

Iven May, Product Manager of Mastercam Art, states, “Everything is becoming more and more customized. People want their logos, their artwork, and even their faces machined into signs, cars and motorcycle parts. They are no longer satisfied with “blocky” shapes but want curvy, organic shapes like leaves, spiders, fish, insects, or any font off their computer. Mastercam Art delivers the power to make these 3D shapes simply and instantly from 2D art.”

Mastercam Art eliminates many of the typical problems of creating machinable artwork. Input ranging from a scanned pencil drawing to a fully developed CAD model can be quickly “sculpted” on-screen in 3D until it looks the way you want it. A suite of software tools allows for easy and quick changes, or reverting to a previous design. Once you have modeled your project, Mastercam Art has a wide variety of fast cutting techniques to ensure the part comes off the machine exactly as imagined.
May notes, “Good technology should allow you to do more complex and sophisticated things, simply and easily, without making you become a more sophisticated user. Mastercam Art users enjoy the power and ease-of-use of the software and many have stated that it is just plain fun to use.

Mastercam Art is an add-on to Mastercam Mill or Mastercam Router Version 9 products.

Mastercam Art Training Available

CNC Software’s latest product, Mastercam Art, now has training available at www.streamingteacher.com. Developed by one of CNC Software’s first Resellers, StreamingteacherTM is a subscription-based delivery of training materials in the form of streaming video and audio.

There are many benefits to learning Mastercam Art using the Streamingteacher courseware. They include:

Learn where you can - you can learn from anywhere that Internet access is available.
Learn by seeing - there are downloadable files provided which allow you to work along with the projects being shown in the videos. You learn by watching powerful streaming videos that are designed to be followed in Mastercam.
Learn when you can – you have the ability to pause, rewind and replay each video segment repeatedly, as many times as you would like.
Learn at any time - access the Mastercam training 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from anywhere.
Learn by hearing - listen to crystal clear voice-over lectures.