Paperless Process

[Madison]

With the exception of parts made on our lathe and drilling simple holes with a drill press, all of our processes are completely paperless. Parts made on the lathe are not paperless only because its CNC capabilities leave a lot to be desired -- though the potential to use it as such is there.

Nearly all parts are designed in Solidworks, though sometimes we'll use Microsoft Visio for simple, two-dimensional parts.

For parts made on the mill, I use MasterCAM V.9 to create all of the toolpaths. We have a license of MasterCAM X as well, but I prefer V.9. The mill has onboard software to execute the code.

For our plasma cutter, we use SheetCAM to automatically generate toolpaths. It's a very fast process, as SheetCAM is very good at determining kerf compensation on its own and generates the toolpaths in less than a second. The plasma cutter is driven by software called Mach3. It's pretty easy to use, though the interface is a bit cludgy.

Finally, our laser cutter behaves as a printer, so we can print parts to it directly from within Microsoft Visio.

We're able to make parts reasonably quickly and they're accurate. It's enormously helpful and we've been able to eliminate a lot of work remaking parts that aren't up to snuff because of human error. I don't know if I could go back to doing all of this any other way.