Sandvik Coromant has Designed a Plan for Enhanced Productivity

Sandvik Coromant has Designed a Plan for Enhanced Productivity… As the world’s largest cutting tool manufacturer, Sandvik Coromant has been designing and planning the efficient implement of cutting tools for generations. MTDCNC had James Rhys-Davies, the Strategic Relations Director For Sales Area North Europe of Sandvik Coromant into the MTD studio to tell us a little more…

“Sandvik Coromant has seen a bigger shift now of where we need to support customers, not only inside the machine but also further upstream into the CAD/CAM environment. So, we have cutting data Apps for your mobile phone that is a tool guide. It’s a really useful App with 20,000 materials in there. It also gives you starting values such as speeds and feeds for different materials. Also, it helps you to choose the right tools for the job and then as we move further in, we have the ISO database of tool models. This allows you to build a tool assembly up within a matter of minutes. This is an open database as long as people subscribe to the ISO 13399 catalogue; you can incorporate the catalogue into the data.”

“When we say it’s an ‘open database’ that means it’s free. To make people more productive – firstly, it’s available 24/7. So, if somebody is in the machine shop on a Sunday night and they don’t know the right speeds and feeds to run for any given material or application whether its drilling, milling or turning – all the operator has to do is turn on the App and they get the data ‘live’ in their hands. This data is based on speeds, feeds and parameters for Sandvik Coromant tooling products.”

From a design perspective, Mr Rhys-Davies continues: “If you have a model in your database, you can build-up your tools and bring 3D models into the tool assembly. From this, a few clicks of the button and that data can be exported out to the CNC machine tool via your NC program. In essence, the system allows you to model your tools, check for collisions and if the tools are running true and just check that everything is correct with regards to fixturing, tooling, lengths and so on.”

With regard to saving time for the end user, Mr Rhys-Davies says: “If I was building a typical model up with a back-end, extension and cutting tool – inherently that would take 15 minutes to put together from an ISO database. The data just pulls in the constituent parts and it knows where the connection points are, so you can stick them together in literally two minutes. If you had 100 tools to do, that could be 25 hours whereas at 2 minutes per tool, that would be less than an hour. We want people to get the most out of their machines and if we can reduce the set-up times, that is a positive. As for the cutting data, these are starting values, so they are not overly ambitious in the speed and feed parameters but they will deliver stable machining conditions.”