The busy shopfloor at TooltechWhen Mark Newcombe had an opportunity to acquire the company that he had worked with for over 15 years, he grabbed it with both hands. Having a clear vision for Plymouth-based
Tooltech Ltd, the company entered the aerospace industry as a niche manufacturer of wax injection mould tools and ancillary tooling.
More than 20 years later, the company has been driven forward at a rapid pace, a trajectory that has been directed by investment in the workforce and cutting-edge technology — like for instance the investment in hyperMILL CAM software from
Open Mind Technologies.
The shopfloor at Tooltech consists of machine tools such as AD35L EDM machines from Sodick, three- to five-axis machining centres from YCM, Hedelius and Mikron, XYZ turning centres and also 3-D printing technology.
Andrew Newcombe, Tooltech operations manager, said: “The company began back in 1997 when my father, Mark, bought the business off his old boss — and he developed it into the company that it is today. We produce bespoke tooling for the aerospace and power generation sectors, producing injection moulds and all the fixturing that goes alongside that.”
The company primarily makes one- and two-off components and assemblies, and this is the main reason why Tooltech opted for CAM software from Open Mind Technologies. Alluding to why the company has transitioned to hyperMILL, Mr Newcombe continued: “We had a lot of surface finish problems and there were a lot of collisions, which you do not expect from your CAM software. That was the main problem for our business and what we were struggling with, and the reason we looked around and found hyperMILL.
“We had a demonstration, and it was extremely good — and this has been the case since we implemented the software. We have witnessed much better surface finishes on our components, and we no longer have to worry about collisions with our machines. When components now come off the machine, there is no secondary hand finishing.”
“With hyperMILL, you have a lot more strategies to choose from and it is also very easy to change from one strategy to another. So, if one strategy is not the best fit — there is always another one to easily choose to achieve the correct surface finish.”
Adding to this, Lance Jobe, Tooltech assistant operations manager, said: “We were struggling with our previous CAM software, and we were finding it difficult to achieve our desired surface finishes, we were also having collisions on the shopfloor with our machines and the staff weren’t getting enough information from the sheets that we were putting out to them. We decided to change to hyperMILL after a very successful demonstration in January last year. We saw some things during that demonstration that covered all of the weaknesses that we were seeing in our current software, so we decided to make the switch.”
Referring to the variety of machine tools and wide range of cutting tools, and how it all works in harmony with the shopfloor, Mr Newcombe said: “It was very easy to learn how to set up the tool libraries for our diverse range of machines. With entirely new software, training was a daunting prospect, but after three days of training and an additional couple of days playing around with the system — it all clicked into place.
“We also undertook three days of advanced training and by the end of that, we were good to go! In just eight days, our business had undergone a complete transition. During the training and transition stage, Open Mind Technologies has always been there and given us the support we have needed. All of the training was done remotely, and our training hours were 10am to 4pm, so we could still get work done in the mornings.
“There is a lot less bench work now. The jobs now come off the machines to a much higher standard than what we were getting and there is a lot less secondary work that our guys have to do before the jobs are shipped out of the door. The post processors were another very straightforward factor. It was one of the biggest concerns we had when changing our CAM software, as we have a lot of different machines in our facility — but it was very simple and I cannot fault it.”
Mr Jobe added: “hyperMILL has been very good with our bench work. After the blocks have come off the machine, we have found that we have a lot less deburring to do and a lot less polishing. This means manufacturing times are greatly reduced from when the component comes off the machine tool to when it gets delivered to the customer.
“It is also a lot quicker to program hyperMILL than our previous software; it is so interactive with the model, you can take a lot of the geometries straight from the model and begin programming straightaway. There is no work required beforehand either where you have to create a lot of boundaries and surfaces. The transition over to hyperMILL has been very straightforward and it has had minimum impact on our production. Overall, our experience with hyperMill has been fantastic.”
Mr Newcombe concluded: “We are really happy with the new CAM software and we now wish we had bought it years ago. It has been such an easy transition, even though we had some concerns about changing from one CAM software solution to another, especially as we had been using our previous software for so long. Now that we have gone through the transitional period, I can safely say that it has been simple and straightforward to move over to hyperMill, and in reality it is something we should have done five years ago.”