High Speed Milling from STL-files

From: j.Gunnink@ind.tno.nl
Date: Wed May 19 1999 - 17:57:52 EEST


Dear Brad and Terry and other RP-friends,

Maybe you know (or maybe not) but TNO Industrial Prototyping is working with
High Speed Milling on STL-files since 1997. All the injection, deepdraw,
blowmold etc tools we make and all the machined prototypes are milled by
using this technology. We are using Powermill from Delcam and are very happy
with it and with the cooperation and support we have with them. In the
passed we used different 3D-CAD-CAM system and always found loads of
troubles and crashes with these systems. We were not able to garantue
first-time-right and therefor very short delivery times for our customers
for prototypes or tools. Both in the usage of these systems (experienced
high educated persons needed instead of the craftmen on the workfloor who
know what milling is) as in the reliablity of the outputted NC-files many
problems occured. Due to our wide experiecce with STL-files (FDM, MJM, LOM
and KIRA machines in house) we found the solution in milling on STL-files
and in our case in Powermill of DELCAM. In two years time we made hundred of
NC-programmes and had only ONE little mistake in ONE NC-file, and skilled
craftsmen on the workfloor can use it with little help. (approx. 1-2 days
training)

(Besides DELCAM we also know that especially in the prototyping area
DESKPROTO from Delft Spline Systems gives good value for money. Cimatron,
VisiCAM, Tebis claim that they can calculate millingpaths on STL-files but
we don't have any hands-on or experiences with that.)

We shared our experiences and the reason why it is better and faster to
calculate millingpaths on STL-files in a paper presented at two
international conferences: the Time Compression Technologies '98 in
Nottingham UK and the Scandinavian Conference on RP&M '98 in Aarhus (DTI)
DK. You can find our paper in the conference proceedings. The title was High
Speed Milling by using the STL-Technology. When you don't have or want to
get the proceedings send me an E-mail then i can send you a copy of our
paper. If you visit the European Conference on Rapid Prototyping and
Manufacturing in June 1999 in Nottingham then you will also find something
alike in the proceedings because they also asked us to present it at that
Conference. If you want to know more you can always phone or E-mail me.

Bye from a very sunny Holland

Jan Willem Gunnink

For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/



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