Contacts

SOLID Applications Ltd. Oldbury Head Office

Head Office: MAP

Old Market Place
Market St
Oldbury
West Midlands
B69 4DH

Tel: (0121) 544 1400
Fax: (0121) 544 1600

Info@solidedgeuk.com

Northern Office: MAP

Unit 99
North Mersey Business Ctr.
Woodward Rd.
Knowsley Ind. Park
Merseyside
L33 7UY

Case Studies

3D assembly modelling helps extrusion press components manufacturer win contracts.

When you are using 15 tons of costly, hot-work treated steel each week in the manufacture of your products, being able to accurately calculate the weight required for a specific job at the proposal stage can make the difference between winning or losing a contract on price.

Intoco use Solid Edge
Being able to do this is just one of the benefits which Cheltenham-based extrusion press tool design and manufacturing company, Intoco, is experiencing since it invested in the very latest 3D solid and assembly modelling technology.

Although the company already has a 2D drafting system, which it has been using for the past four or five years, Mike Parker, Intoco’s senior projects engineer, realised that 3D modelling, as opposed to 2D drafting, was the way forward for the company if it was to meet the tighter and tighter margins and deadlines being demanded by its customers.

Furthermore, a 3D solid modelling system would enable him to add software at a later stage to perform finite element analysis on the CAD models. This would help to reduce the risk of over-engineering a new design and the consequent cost penalties which that can incur.

The decision was made to invest in a system based on Siemens PLM Software’s Microsoft Windows-native Solid Edge software. The new system, comprising one Pentium-based workstation, was installed late 1996 and is now being used alongside the existing 2D drafting system to model metal extrusion press tool parts and to establish their dimensional accuracy. Currently, 3D models are exported to the 2D drafting system for detailing but Mike Parker intends to migrate all new design and detailing work over to the new system during the course of the next year or so, leaving just one of the original 2D ‘seats’ for use in modifying old drawings. Parker cites a number of important benefits which the new 3D system gives him compared with his old 2D drafting system. For example, being able to model assemblies of parts in 3D helps in manufacturing planning by allowing design and production engineers to check the model for manufacturability. This is not possible with a 2D system.

The improved quality of information which design engineers are able to pass to the shop-floor is a tremendous help to the production staff. The drawing office will now regularly insert a 3D view of a part or assembly, automatically, into a detail drawing to show the shop-floor exactly what it is they are being asked to manufacture.

And because Solid Edge is Windows-native and uses Microsoft’s OLE (object linking and embedding) technology, Intoco are now able to drag and drop 3D models of a new press tool design directly into their quotation system for inclusion in a new contract proposal. Furthermore, because a 3D solid model will contain mass properties information, accurate costings can be calculated by directly transferring weight and materials information from the CAD model into the costing system.

Call us on (0121) 544 1400, Fax on (0121) 544 1600 or Email info@solidedgeUK.com