Check it Out: Watch Mold Design Keys to Success

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Whatever you do, it all boils down to your ability to deliver high-quality work as quickly as possible. Sometimes in their quest for efficiency, people get enamored with the bells and whistles. But nifty features alone won’t do it. If it were so, those sneakers I got with the action wedges in them would have empowered me to leap above the fray, dunk the ball, and win the game and the hearts of every cheerleader. No, rather, it’s how the software integrates with and advances your processes. Today’s Check It Out on-demand webinar is about CAD/CAM software with cool features that also strives to make your processes more efficient.

The on-demand webinar is called “Mold Design: Keys to Success,” and it’s a 60-minute production from the Cimatron Group, which offers GibbsCAM CAD/CAM software and CimatronE. The latter is the webinar’s focus. (By the way, Cimatron also offers a website of CAD/CAM resources that you might like to check out. It’s called “Better Mold Making.”)

CimatronE CAD/CAM is a suite of applications for toolmakers and manufacturers. It covers the range of mold, die, and tool making, and 2.5-  to 5-axis milling and drilling, NC programming, and the like. It automates a lot of tasks for efficiency, and it provides full associativity across the manufacturing process. Part analysis, quoting, ECOs on the fly, electrode design, standard or non-standard mold bases, it doesn’t matter. CimatronE seems engineered to take on the entire process.

The video is divided into two major parts bookended with two short sections, an intro and, at the end, a good Q&A session. It opens with a demo. While the demo shows a bunch of neat features, it’s really a mechanism to show you CimatronE’s approach—philosophy if you will—which is to help streamline your process and increase your efficiency by enabling you to create a repeatable and lean process that moves from part analysis to quote to tool design to NC programming and electrode design seamlessly. That might sound like a rigidly serial methodology, but you’ll see that the process and the presentation are more fluid than that.

A lot is worth seeing here. For example, at the 14:05 mark,  there’s a demo of CimatronE’s function for working on internal islands. It chains a boundary and extends and trims an entire area at once, which seems to be a really efficient way of operating. At 25 minutes, the simulation and visualization demo is fascinating. Everything in this webinar seems understated,  although little asides like “you can package this animation off to your client to show them what’s going to happen” will grab your attention.

At about 29 minutes, the webinar segues to a case study presented by a gentleman from a company called Aluminum Injection Mold. Now,  this company is interesting because they make all their molds in house using CimatronE,  and the person assigned the project takes it all the way from beginning to end. You’ll like this testimonial.

“Mold Design: Keys to Success” follows a steady pace, and it’s all business. Neither of the presenters are the professional voices that sound like they do voiceovers for radio ads on the side. Information just keeps flowing at you. This is good stuff. Hit the link and check it out.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Watch: Mold Design Keys to Success

Better Mold Making