On-Demand Webinar: Mold-Making with DED (Direct Energy Deposition)
Affordable, reliable, safe and easy-to-use metal 3D printer for many applications including mold-making! The Meltio M450 is designed for industry without the need for industrial infrastructure. Ideal for small to medium size part fabrication and multi-metal 3D printing research the M450 is perfect for agricultural, transportation, energy, consumer goods, electronics, aerospace, defense, and heavy industrial markets to name a few. Meltio's Wire Laser Metal 3D Printing is an excellent solution for the manufacturing of conformally cooled molds and dies. Additionally, it's cost-efficient and has the potential to increase performance. Join Meltio's Application Manager, Giorgio Oliveri, for an informational webinar on Mold-Making with DED (Direct Energy Deposition) and Dual Wire, Meltio's specialty. Watch Now Want more general information about Meltio and their open material platform using metallic wire? Visit our website.
Using the Mastercam 2023 Apply Button
There is a new Apply button feature available in Mastercam’s Mill toolpaths that allows you to preview cutting motion, resulting in streamlined toolpath creation. In the past, when programming options like multi-passes, you needed to take an educated guess at the number of passes required to cover the area we were machining. In Mastercam 2022, you were able to use the Preview Toolpath button to see the cutting motion before exiting the dialogue. Now, in Mastercam 2023, this button has been removed, but the behavior is retained. This post will explain how to use this feature in Mastercam 2023. Using traditional toolpath creation, after the path was started and you entered in the settings for the cutting options, you could exit and create the path. If any of the settings you choose were not correct, you needed to go back into the operation and edit them. In our example below, our multi-passes were incorrect because we had too many and needed to reduce the number of passes. In this case, we had the Generate Toolpath option turned on. This automatically regenerated the toolpath when we hit the green check. We also used the Preview function to get our settings right the first time. [...]
Desktop Metal Live Sinter
Desktop Metal Live Sinter produces quality parts that meet form and dimensional tolerances right out of the furnace, in one or two iterations. Today we’re going to show you an effective way to ensure that metal 3D-printed parts meet form and dimensional requirements right out of the furnace. Although metal 3D printing has many advantages, it can be challenging to predict the final part geometry due to the many physical forces introduced during the sintering process. The part is pushed and pulled in different directions, due to significant forces caused by gravity, friction, and uneven shrinkage due to density variations. This in turn may lead to deformation, warping, cracking, slumping, and parts that emerge from the furnace out of form and out of tolerance. It can quickly become a guessing game. Currently, manufacturers must rely on best practices and the intuition of a relatively few engineers who have hands-on experience with sintering, in an attempt to get good parts right out of the furnace. This can be a time-consuming, iterative process, before achieving the desired results. In contrast, Desktop Metal has taken a different approach. They have developed a first-of-its-kind, multi-physics simulation, and compensation software, that enables one to produce straight, defect-free, and [...]
Troubleshooting Mastercam 3D Toolpath Jumping
In this blog post we are going to show you how to resolve a common issue that can arise using Mastercan 3D toolpaths; erratic jumping along the cut. For this example, we used a flowline toolpath on the geometry to cut the material on the inside of the surfaces. The toolpath we applied looked pretty good, with nice clean passes around the inside of the feature. To begin, let’s take a look at how we would expect the cut to turn out. We are using a flowline toolpath on this geometry to cut the material on the inside of the surfaces. If you wanted to go back and attempt to make a new operation from scratch, you could select all the geometry you need. In our case, we selected the orange surfaces as the Drive surfaces and the green surface as the Check surface. In this case, we wanted to machine the orange features and ignore the green. Unlike the previous path, in this new toolpath jumping happens along the upper passes. These jumps occur due to the check surface. By taking a close look at the geometry, it’s possible can see very small overlaps that get in the way of the desired [...]
Metrology Minute – Resizing Section Planes for Custom 2D Cross-Sections
In this issue of our Metrology Minute, we will discuss how to resize section planes so that just the necessary geometry is displayed. This becomes extremely useful for very complex models where you want to draw the reviewer’s attention to a specific location on the model. In order to do this, the first thing we needed to do, in our example below, was to create the plane that we planned to use to create the partial section. We identified these three points first as circle centers and then we fitted a plane through those points as shown below. Next, we placed a point at the center of the large water pump cover radius and created an offset plane, parallel to our construction plane and passing through that point. This is the plane that was used to create the partial section. After we instructed Control X to create the 2D Section, plane control handles became available, enabling us to control just how much of the section was cut by the plane and exactly which cross-sectional geometry was shown. If we wanted to isolate just a single area where the large inlet was located, we could have reduced the size of the plane where just [...]
Freescan Combo 3D Scanner – New Kid on the Block
The Freescan Combo 3D Scanner is a multifunctional, hybrid light source, metrology-grade scanner. The tiny footprint makes scanning of tight quarters much more accessible than with traditional handheld scanners. By having four (4) working modes, the Combo is perhaps the most versatile, handheld scanner, on the market. In Laser mode, it offers multiple laser scanning options; multi-laser scanning (26 crossing lasers), single laser line scanning (for deep holes) fine line scanning (for very high resolution) and infrared (structured light) operations. In Infrared mode, the Combo offers scanning where targets are optional for highly detailed objects or subjects. And while the speed of multiple laser line scanning is 1.86 million points/second, the infrared mode scans at an incredible speed of 2.5 million points/second. Having a total tolerance of just 20 microns (.00078”) and a maximum resolution of just 30 microns (.0012”), this scanner is perfect for high-precision metrology applications as well as reverse engineering, organic scanning and just about any other scanning application. The resolution in Fine Laser mode, where the scanner uses seven parallel laser lines for scanning can achieve incredible levels of detail. Due to the compact size and revolutionary design, the scanner is amazing at capturing fine detail, even ‘seeing’ into very [...]