Have you ever bought something and been disappointed with the design of one of the mechanical components? How nice would it have been if you had access to the right tools to make your own custom components? That is exactly what happened to my Co-Worker, John when he bought a roof-mounted tent for off-roading. The tent itself worked fine, however the “universal” mounting brackets did not work particularly well for gripping onto a round roof-rack frame. Check out the photo of the stock brackets and make your own assessment: How well can a flat piece of metal and a couple of bolts grip onto a round bar?
What John needed was a new design that had the ability to grip onto a larger area of the round rack profile for increased stability. It also needed to be cheap and easy to manufacture from scrap metal from the machine shop. Enter SolidWorks and CAMWorks to take this initial concept from design to manufacturing. Literally within minutes he was able to take the necessary measurements off of the existing part and draw up a customized concept in SolidWorks!
Once the concept was finished it was time to start prototyping. John sent me the .sldprt file that contained all the necessary design data so I could start machining. All I had to do was import the file into my CAM system so I could apply toolpath to the model… Oh wait… I didn’t even have to do that because CAMWorks runs inside the SolidWorks environment. Meaning the moment I opened the part in SolidWorks, CAMWorks already had access to all of the necessary geometry and sketches. The same ones that were used to draw up the part in the first place. Talk about a huge time-saver… I’m not even sure I want John to know how easy the whole process was. Minutes later I had toolpath on the part and I was able to graphically verify the material removal using the built-in toolpath simulation.
It was time to start machining, or so I thought. I headed out to the shop to start picking out tools and material and I realized that a couple of the pieces of scrap that I wanted to use for these parts were not quite big enough. I couldn’t justify the cost of more material (working for beer) so I needed to see if it would be OK if I made this over-engineered part just a bit smaller. I went ahead and made a change to the width of the part and sent the file back to John so he could see what I did. He approved the change and went ahead and made a few more dimensional changes to make it even easier for me to find suitable scrap stock. What John never knew is that the part file I sent him had CAMWorks data attached to it. Since he is only a SolidWorks user, the CAMWorks information was completely hidden when he opened the part on his machine. However, once I opened the part file that he sent back to me CAMWorks noticed that there were some changes made to the model.
After one click of the mouse the part was rebuilt and the toolpath updated to reflect the changed geometry. After two clicks I verified the update using the toolpath simulation. After three clicks I had a fresh G-code file to take out the shop. Less time spent fussing with updates and changes = more time machining parts and more time to hit the trails!
If you have and questions about this project, or about how you can benefit from SolidWorks and CAMWorks solutions, feel free to comment on this blog post.
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