by Kip Hanson
Still on the fence over which five axis machining centre is best for your application? If you’re a CGTech customer, you’re in luck. That’s according to product manager Gene Granata, who says that it’s possible to virtually test drive practically any machine tool in the company’s Vericut brand of toolpath simulation, verification, and optimization software.
“A number of our customers have found that the best way to evaluate a machine they’re thinking about purchasing is to model it first in Vericut, something that they can do very quickly by downloading the appropriate CAD file from the machine builder, or just modeling some of the machine’s components themselves,” he says. “This lets them use Vericut’s MDI (Manual Data Input) capability to test behavior on the virtual machine to make sure they can reach everything, and see how the machine will perform. It shows them how it’s going to behave—or not behave—for their particular application, and confidence to know their manufacturing strategies will work.”
Whatever the brand, whatever its orientation and whatever you’re cutting, Granata notes that it’s critical you protect your investment and maximize its potential. “We’ve done a tremendous amount of work with five axis machining centres large and small, vertical and horizontal,” he says. “The beauty of Vericut is that it’s completely machine and configuration independent. It provides a digital twin of any style or brand of machine tool, and now with our Force optimization module, gives customers the ability to not only simulate the machining cycle, but significantly shorten it as well by recalculating program feed rates that provide ideal maximum safe cutting conditions for the machine tool and all cutting tools used on it.” SMT
