TMAC Cuts Tooling Costs at Wolfram Manufacturing
Full Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Tim with Wolfram Manufacturing. I’m going to talk to you a little bit about how we use Caron Engineering’s TMAC system across all of our processes. It’s an essential tool that we have on every machine in our shop. In this case we’re running it across three different spindles. We do both the main and some turning spindles and the live tooling Mill spindle. We’re able to look at where tools have areas of high engagement where you can change up the tool paths. We use it for machine monitoring and protection so that we’re able to run fully automated lights out without the stress and worry of a tool breaking, machine crashes when something doesn’t remove enough material. Here you can see the TMAC is monitoring the tool and the cut in real time this is a half inch End Mill cutting doing high efficiency pass in 4140 hardened steel. In the event that a tool does break TMAC can respond in milliseconds and stop all spindles and machine axes. So at Wolfram we operate a little bit differently. We don’t have an operator standing in front of every single machine because TMAC allows us to walk away. And because of the remote system access I’m able to check in on the condition of the cuts from my desk or from home. Anybody that has access to the system is able to check on the machine progress and how well everything is running. So with TMAC we can very accurately monitor the wear of the tools. We’re able to take a log from a fresh tool, overlay it with a tool in the middle of its life and one at the end of its life, and and see the difference in the power of the cut. This allows us to really maximize our tool life across all of the spindles and because of that we can save hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month in tooling costs.
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