Production Machining
• Production Milling
• Production Turning
• Productivity Toolbox
EdgeCAM is an industry leading CAM solution for all your production machining needs. Applications include prismatic and surface milling, complex multi-axis turning, mill/turn, rotary and multi-plane milling and family of parts machining. Innovative supporting solutions for a more productive and profitable machine shop are supplied. These include excellent toolpath simulation, a unique wizard approach to postprocessing, a comprehensive tooling database, intuitive and flexible machine tool communications and a web-enabled job management system.
Production Milling
EdgeCAM provides the production machine shop with a wide range of flexible milling cycles. Machining efficiency is maximized on simple and complex prismatic parts as well as those incorporating sculptured surface geometry. With EdgeCAM you get prismatic machining combined with powerful 3D solid and surface machining strategies, all in one complete solution.
Intelligent Roughing Cycle
EdgeCAM's advanced roughing cycle for the machining of both 2D and 3D areas can be applied to the complete model, providing consistent performance on all types of model. A laced or concentric strategy can be implemented with bottom to top intermediate slicing between levels. This intelligent cycle automatically applies the most efficient approach move for each region of the model and creates trochoidal moves to avoid full width cuts. The ability to define 3D stock reduces machining time by eliminating air cutting.
EdgeCAM's roughing cycle also incorporates rest roughing, where stock is automatically defined by the preceding roughing cycle, so the smaller tool only creates a toolpath in the areas that the larger tool could not access.
Profiling Cycle
EdgeCAM's profiling cycle allows you to generate toolpaths on 2D geometry, 3D surfaces and solids in one easy to use cycle. The main advantage to the user is a consistent interface and support for advanced features and functionalities in both 2D and 3D environments. This intelligent cycle offers cusp height and cut increment controls and excellent surface finish for both steep and shallow regions. Using integrated cutter radius compensation, the cutting side is determined and compensation calls generated automatically between multiple profiles and levels.
Highly effective controls can be used to determine the start and end positions for the profiling cycle. A full set of corner rounding strategies allows you to choose the most appropriate method for machining corners.
Prismatic Machining
EdgeCAM's prismatic machining functionality offers a comprehensive range of 2D machining cycles, helping you to maximize your productivity.
Facemill Cycle
This cycle optimizes the use of facemill tooling and can be utilized on parts with planar features such as walls, bosses and other flat areas. The cycle allows you to define the area to be machined by selecting a boundary. Nested boundaries are supported, and resulting toolpaths are associative to their respective feature boundaries.
Thread Milling
Internal, external, single and multi-start threads are programmed to provide canned cycle support.
Hole Cycles
Drilling, reaming, boring and tapping cycles are all supported. EdgeCAM's ‘hole optimization' calculates the shortest path for machining a set of holes, reducing cycle times and machine travel to offer maximum productivity.
Surface Machining
Recent trends in component design have resulted in an increased need to incorporate complex shaped geometry in production machining. Previously, such requirements were limited to short run, or one-off machining environments such as the mold, die and prototyping industries. EdgeCAM offers a full range of surface machining functionality that can be used by the production machinist equally effectively to machine large quantity batches. Solid models are machined using innovative, reliable and gouge free cycles. Intelligent approach strategies provide improved surface finish while optimizing machining times and maximizing tool life. Adaptive leads and links ensure collision free entry and exit on and off the job.
Parallel Lace
Perhaps the most popular finishing cycle, Parallel Lace can be controlled by stepover, cusp height, cut increment and minimum and maximum angle of cut. This intelligent cycle takes parallel cuts along the part, and allows for optimum, climb or conventional approaches. Used in combination with profiling, a consistent surface finish can be maintained by defining the cut angle. This angle specifies where the strategies meet on sloping shapes.
Constant Cusp Finishing
This cycle generates a 3D toolpath that maintains a constant surface stepover from one pass to the next. It produces a toolpath that can be defined from a drive curve or boundary.
Projection Finishing
Projection machining is a method of finish machining a part according to its design. It applies the required surface finish and cut pattern quickly and easily over the whole model or discreet features.
EdgeCAM's Projection Finishing strategies allow
•A 2D toolpath to be projected onto a 3D surface
•A circular, radial, concentric or spiral pattern to be projected for finishing bosses or pockets
•A pair of flow curves to drive a lace toolpath along or across a surface
Pencil Milling and Rest Finishing
Pencil Milling and Rest Finishing cycles are used to clean up material remaining from a previous finishing cycle with a larger tool. Pencil Finishing executes this as a single pass along internal edges and intersections, whilst Rest Finishing consists of a series of passes and is typically used to machine internal radii.
Flat Land Finishing
This cycle automatically detects the flat areas on the model and applies a lacing or concentric clearance pattern on these areas. Combined with the Parallel Lace cycle for the machining of steep areas, it provides the most efficient strategy for the machining of free-form components, by ensuring that the most appropriate tooling is used for the machining of different areas of the model.
EdgeCAM's Flat Land Finishing cycle also incorporates rest machining that allows you to finish areas that have been left by a larger tool in a previous machining cycle.
Multi-Axis and Multi-Plane Machining
EdgeCAM supports the machining of holes, pockets and surfaces on different faces of the part, reducing total setup time and taking advantage of multi-axis machine capabilities. EdgeCAM offers full support for multi-axis milling, including 4-axis rotary machining, 3-axis machining plus 2-axis simultaneous indexing and 5-axis machining for trimming, and de-flashing of single surfaces.
When machining multi-faced parts, or multiple parts mounted on a tombstone fixture, EdgeCAM can easily position to any face to allow full use of both prismatic and surface machining cycles. Machining sequences and toolpaths can be merged into a single sequence and rationalised by tool, index position or datum to produce an optimal program. EdgeCAM Simulator displays all the multi-axis and rotational multi-plane moves for realistic process simulation and collision checking.
Production Turning
EdgeCAM Turning provides functionality for a wide range of machine tools, including 2-axis lathes, multi-turret configurations, sub-spindle turning centers and mill/turn machines. On a mill/turn machine, C-, Y- and B-axis milling and drilling take place within the same program as the turning to provide a fully integrated and associative programming solution. Ease of use and an understanding that cycle times are critical, especially on multi-configuration mill/turn machines, underpin the development of EdgeCAM's turning functionality.
EdgeCAM produces advanced rough and finish turning cycles, together with support for facing, boring and drilling in either canned cycle or longhand format. Toolpath calculation takes into consideration the complete tooling insert and previously machined material to avoid gouging and eliminate air cutting.
EdgeCAM offers support for Sandvik Coromant Wiper inserts for turning tools, allowing these productivity enhancing inserts to be used reliably in all aspects of production machining.
Grooving Cycles
External, internal and face grooving are all simple tasks with EdgeCAM. Side grooving cycles enable the programmer to produce sophisticated machining strategies that take advantage of advanced tooling design.
Thread Turning
Taper, single and multi-start threads are easily programmed to provide canned cycle or longhand support.
4-Axis Turning
Using EdgeCAM, machines with twin turrets are easily programmed and synchronised for maximum efficiency. Balanced and mirror cutting cycles exploit the metal removal capabilities of multi-turret machines. Individual turret control and turret synchronisation ensure maximum efficiency. Separate instruction lists for each turret allow easy editing of synchronisation points and machining instructions.
EdgeCAM Simulator provides full 4-axis representation of the upper and lower turret, providing sequence verification before the machining process commences.
Sub-Spindle Turning
EdgeCAM includes an easy-to-use multi-axis turning module for programming sub-spindle lathes. As with multi-turret machine configurations, cycle time and the ability to turn a part completely in one operation are of paramount importance when working with sub-spindle lathes.
Integrated commands to control activities associated with sub-spindle lathes make programming easier. Main features include:
•Integrated lathe setup command guides you through machine and job setup.
•Spindle selection is made easy with a single mouse click and the instruction browser indicates clearly which spindle each instruction is for.
•For twin turret lathes the side-by-side view of the instruction browser offers an ideal programming environment. The turret synchronisations are lined up and, to inhibit conflicting spindle codes being programmed, turret priority is clearly indicated. Synchronisation positions can be moved around to reduce machine idle time and a time line view of the instructions across spindles and turrets is useful for program verification.
•Sub-spindle pick off is simple to program using a combination of Spindle Docking, Part Off and Move Sub-spindle commands and is very flexible.
•Within EdgeCAM Simulator, activities taking place on the main and sub-spindle can be simulated simultaneously. Batch simulation of the machining job includes animation of the sub-spindle pick off and bar feed for full program verification.
B-Axis Machining
Single set-up machining is the key to boosting metal cutting productivity when milling and turning are done on the same machine tool. EdgeCAM provides full support for B-axis machining on a mill/turn machine tool, allowing EdgeCAM users to benefit from the wide range of milling and drilling cycles by applying them to the B-axis of multi-configuration machine tools.
B & C-axis orientation commands make rotary positioning easy. Having indexed to a face the full power of EdgeCAM machining cycles are now available to you. The Maintain Index function on the toolchange command reduces command input when
carried out at the same index position. Realistic simulation of the B-axis in EdgeCAM Simulator offers full program verification.
C- and Y-Axis Mill/Turn Machines
The complete range of EdgeCAM's milling and hole machining cycles can be implemented on mill/turn machines. EdgeCAM allows driven tooling to be programmed for machining on the face or the diameter of a component. Switching between Y- and C-axis modes is a single click process.
As with other cycles, EdgeCAM Simulator provides realistic graphical verification, ensuring that programs are correct before being executed. Both milling and turning activities can be verified, showing rotary movement of the stock and chuck during C-axis milling.
back to top |
