Another Approach toward Skill-less Manufacturing of Molds and Dies

Abstract

Mold and die manufacturing is a fundamental technology of the mechanical production. Because of the economical reason, major manufacturing companies in Japan are changing their mold and die suppliers from domestic companies to companies in other Asian countries. In order to support the Japanese die and mold manufactures, some national projects are in progress. Their common concept is an extraction of the manufacturing skill of the expert engineers and its transformation to the computer programs. In this paper, the author proposes another approach toward the skill-less manufacturing of molds and dies. The concept of our approach is the development of ultra fact CAM programs, so that the manufacturing experts can use their skill more efficiently. Based on this concept, our group is developing some CAM programs, which can execute complex geometric computations for process planning, NC data generation and its verification 10 to 100 times faster. Basic idea, used technology and some developed applications are briefly introduced.