CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
14 January 2008
Implementation Investments
Delcam CADCAM Gives Oscor Prototype to Production in Days
Delcam's CADCAM software is the key for Oscor Inc.'s rapid introduction of its minute medical components. "We do a lot of R&D and constantly come up with new products," said Ed Smith, chief of manufacturing engineering. "We often must be able to go from prototype to production in a matter of days. One of the ways we are able to do this is to produce all our tooling in-house. This gives us control over the development and helps us achieve very fast turnaround on every tool."
Oscor Inc. designs, develops, manufactures and markets a range of highly-specialised lead systems for pacemakers and a variety of other medical applications. Most are high-volume, high-accuracy components. According to Mr. Smith, "On our higher-volume parts, we produce in the range of 100,000 parts per month. Typical tolerances are .0002 inches."
Oscor operates a state-of-the-art machine shop, which includes high-speed CNC vertical mills and a Roku Roku turning centre served by a robotic loading system. "We have a total of four high-speed milling machines, two Mori Seiki machines for metalcutting and two others for graphite electrodes," Mr. Smith reported. "All can run at 20,000 rpm. The CNC mills use very small cutters, down to a 0.005" diameter ball milling cutter for the electrodes." The company also runs six Star Swiss-turn machines.
Mr. Smith introduced Delcam CADCAM software into Oscor. "We now use PowerSHAPE and PowerMILL for our mills and PartMaker for our Swiss-turn machines. Our Mitsubishi wire EDMs are run by Partmaker Wire. I've always liked Delcam because it is not a limited product, it has a lot of flexibility for the user built into it," he said.
With PowerSHAPE, Oscor can analyse its mould models for duplicated or missing surfaces, interactively inspect draft angles, and see hard-to-mould areas for the tiny leads. "Ninety per cent of the parts we have to make can be created with solid modelling but, for the other ten per cent, we found that the surface modelling flexibility of PowerSHAPE has been very helpful," Mr. Smith commented.
"PowerMILL even lets us write our own software code to automate our work," Mr. Smith added. "We first create a Visual Basic program and link it back into PowerMILL. For example, this ability has allowed us to automate the robotic handling of electrodes and tell the machine how many, and what kind of, electrodes we want it to produce. Little things like that add up to a lot of time saved."
Another strong point is PowerMILL's range of high-speed machining techniques that help to assure rapid delivery of high-quality mould tools and components for Oscor. According to Mr. Smith, that ability is a big reason customers come to his company. "We can do these micro-moulds faster that most shops could ever hope to," he claimed. "Our specialty is the quick prototype-to-production work in the 30,000 parts per month range and that is where the Delcam software really helps us to be responsive to our customers."
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