The customer was Hubco Forge, a medium-sized company based near Johannesburg, which manufactures steering knuckles, con-rods and other automotive components for the local subsidiaries of VW, BMW and Mercedes, plus a growing list of international customers. Like many other companies, Hubco wanted to increase its toolmaking productivity by introducing high-speed machining and so it purchased two new DMG machines.

Unfortunately, the company chose to upgrade its existing software rather than evaluate the performance available with a new CAM system. The result was two machines standing idle for long periods waiting for CAM data because of the long calculation times. The software had few features supporting high-speed machining so the machining times were much longer than they should have been.

Realising that the poor performance at Hubco was reflecting badly on DMG's reputation, the local machine tool agents approached Delcam's South African representative AZtech with an urgent request to assist Hubco.

AZtech obliged by producing data with PowerMILL to machine one half of a typical forging die. The results were excellent. Even so, AZtech had no desire to become a contact programmer and instead insisted on setting up a detailed demonstration with both the machine tool agents and the staff at Hubco.

Being experienced CAM users, Hubco's two programmers, Dennis Comninos and Vincent Wills found PowerMILL easy to learn and to use. "Since using PowerMILL, we have reduced calculation and cutting times drastically. On one mould alone, we saved days," they reported. "Delcam's PowerMILL is a very powerful package with a wide variety of options."

AZtech

(011) 679 2526