Cetehor is a French
government advisory agency that acts as
a technical center to assist the French
Clockwork, Jewelry, Precious Stone and
Metalworking industries. For over 60
years Cetehor has played a key role in
helping large establishments as well as
small craftsmen in the development of
new products. Cetehor main area of
competence is in the areas of product
design and manufacturing. Its services
include testing and
analysis of new product design, offering
advice and recommendations on choice of
material, equipment and software systems
and offering expertise in the
utilization of these.
Recently this
agency initiated a search for a CAM
software product that would complement
Rhinoceros 3.0 that is widely used as a
design tool in these industries. As Mr.
Suter, whose main functions or
researching and evaluating CAD designs
and prototypes, points out: “Businesses
have found in Rhinoceros 3.0 a tool with
excellent value for money to express
their ideas without limitations, avoid
all risk of style interpretation and
grasp symmetry production. CAD has
become an efficient way of speeding the
production of collections and of easily
enriching them with new creations.”
Mr. Suter benchmarking VisualMill 5.0
Selection of VisualMill
As for
manufacturing, the two different
techniques used by the clockwork and
jewelry industries are rapid prototyping
and milling. Acting on the advice of a
jeweler and a member of Cetehor, they
evaluated VisualMill 5.0 using the
expertise of Pacox the value added
resellers of MecSoft’s products in
France. The intent was to select a CAM
system that could be used in conjunction
with a desktop milling machine.
Mr Suter adds: “We
were looking for a CAM that could offer
various milling strategies, allowing to
create an excellent surface from STL
files. The decision to select VisualMill
was made soon after the presentation.
This is because we worked on real
jewelry cases, which convinced us of the
software’s capabilities. VisualMill is,
for the jeweler a genuine solution to
help react quickly and positively to the
pressures of the market.”
Learning Curve
Mr Gauby, in charge
of Production Research, adds:
“VisualMill and Rhinoceros , present the
benefit of being easily operated by
those who do not deal everyday with CAD
or CAM. They are user-friendly but
contain every function our members need
for 80% of their creations.” This means
that due to the learning curve for these
products being very small it allows even
casual CAD/CAM users to use this
comfortably with very little training.
Application of VisualMill
Typical real world
parts used in these industries were
modeled in Rhinoceros 3.0 and brought
into to VisualMill to perform the
programming of the milling toolpaths.
Milling was done using 2-1/2, 3 and 4
axis methods to mill the master
models. Machining was done on wax to
create these master models. These wax
masters would then be used in a loss wax
casting process to actually manufacture
the parts.
An example of a
master model of a ring programmed and
machined using VisualMill is shown
below.
Toolpath
generation on a ring model in
VisualMill
Cut material
simulation performed in
VisualMill
Final part
prototype cut on machine
Final Word
We at MecSoft are
extremely proud and excited about
Cetehor adopting VisualMill/RhinoCAM a CAM product for
recommendation in the French market. As
we move ahead users can look forward to
additional exciting toolpath methods
targeted specifically at the Jewelry
market.
