Software conversions increase efficiency

Tooling & Production, Jan 1999

CNC downtime is a real profit killer, and a killer Star Tool and Engineering, San Francisco, CA, was staring right in the face. As a jobshop, Star Tool is equipped with a large array of machinery, so most work can be done in-house. The company had CNC machines on the floor using both conventional G-Code, as well as Mazaks, using its own conversational programming system called Mazatrol.

But the company ran into a problem when it needed to free up Mazaks to run specific parts. In order to do this, existing Mazatrol programs had to be run on Mori-Seiki, Okuma, and Shizuoka machines. When doing this, the company ended up having to reprogram the entire part from scratch in G-code, a time consuming process that left the company's machines sitting idle, waiting for the programs, costing Star Tool money in wasted production time.

To employ a higher level of efficiency, a key element in a shop that uses two programming platforms, the company chose Geopath CAD/CAM. The company had been using San Jose, CA-based SolutionWare Corp's Mazatrol Output module, called MazaCAM, which provided the only existing crossplatform programming solution. But Star Tool was still missing a program that automatically converted Mazatrol programs into GCode. That had to do it all from scratch.

Then Star Tool's wish became reality when Geopath was upgraded to do just what Star Tool needed: the ability to convert existing Mazatrol programs into G-Code. And not just generic G-Code, but completely configured for any machine tool.

The way Geopath is capable of doing this is by first importing the existing Mazatrol program off the Mazatrol control into Geopath's Mazatrol editor. Then the Mazatrol program is backplotted into a geometry file with all the tool data, including speeds and feeds, are then taken into Geopath. From that point, Geopath can post the part to any machine. There is no need to reenter all the tool data since it was all imported with the Mazatrol program.

For more information on SolutionWare Corp, San Jose, CA, http://www.solutionware.com

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