We are a 33 years mature electronics company using SE and with our own milling facility to create machined housings for our high tech products.
We have a conflict between the engineering office wanting to create toleranced 2D drawings and the machine shop needing a mid tolerance IGES to feed the mills.
Now I must say that we are not a traditional milling shop in that we had never seen a mill until 3 years ago and have no historic baggage on 'how things would be done by a proper machine shop'. We regard the mill like a printer equivalent on a computer. The design office we believe should be doing the brain work and a file should appear and the mill cut metal. What we do not want to have to do is apply 'operator knowledge' to play with the IGES and add subjective knowledge to the process.
So are we being naive ? Is there a route from SE to take a 2D dimensioned drawing and reset this to mid tolerance just for the IGES ?
BTW we are getting superb results from an old Bridgeport 560 with Heidenheim and a new Hardinge 480 with Fanuc but it is painful having to manually tweak the 2D and the IGES. We use SprutCam as the post processor.
Probably opened a whole can of worms but we would appreciate your comments !
We have a conflict between the engineering office wanting to create toleranced 2D drawings and the machine shop needing a mid tolerance IGES to feed the mills.
Now I must say that we are not a traditional milling shop in that we had never seen a mill until 3 years ago and have no historic baggage on 'how things would be done by a proper machine shop'. We regard the mill like a printer equivalent on a computer. The design office we believe should be doing the brain work and a file should appear and the mill cut metal. What we do not want to have to do is apply 'operator knowledge' to play with the IGES and add subjective knowledge to the process.
So are we being naive ? Is there a route from SE to take a 2D dimensioned drawing and reset this to mid tolerance just for the IGES ?
BTW we are getting superb results from an old Bridgeport 560 with Heidenheim and a new Hardinge 480 with Fanuc but it is painful having to manually tweak the 2D and the IGES. We use SprutCam as the post processor.
Probably opened a whole can of worms but we would appreciate your comments !