Karl Hofmann GmbH & Company located in Bavaria near Munich, Germany has been in business for over 50 years and has been continuing the family tradition into its second generation. In the early 70’s, Mr. Hofman started out manufacturing automatic CAM controlled turning machines, which were used to produce rivets from coil. Today the company has over 20 employees with 11 CNC machines.

The Hofmann Team Left to Right: Head of Mfg, Mr. Robert Hofmann, Head of QA

Need for a New CAM System
In 1984 Mr. Hofmann bought his first CNC milling machine. Five years later the company installed a 2-D CAD software from AutoDesk and 2-½ axis CAM system from Geovision. In 1997 the company upgraded to a 3D CAM system that was integrated with CADKEY (a 3D CAD System).

5th Axis Machining In-Progress

Unfortunately there were bugs in the existing system that often damaged
the surfaces of parts during a simple Horizontal Roughing operation. Mr. Hofmanns’
biggest concern was not being able to prevent such a loss. He was unhappy with the dealer and the manufacturer of the software for not supporting the product with service packs and upgrades.

This was when the company started to look at new systems that would meet their expectations. “But I was shocked with the horrible prices on the market, and then someone suggested VisualMill.” says Mr. Hofmann.

Better Visualization
The ability to work with shaded models and the ease with which VisualMill was able to dynamically manipulate views were indispensable features. Additionally, the completely integrated cut material computation and rendering were a great asset to him.

VisualMill in action

Mr. Hofmann says, “I first looked at the VisualMill 3.0 demo and was convinced that the clean tool path generation and graphical simulation was exactly what he was looking for. I bought VisualMill 4.0. Now with VisualMill 5.0, I am able to mill and drill all parts in 2-½ axis; up to 3D milling in 5-axis. Features like zooming and rotating the part while simulating
at the same time, is really the best of it all.”

Learning curve
The time spent at learning VisualMill was unbelievable short. “We had VisualMill 4.0, which is easy to understand and the latest version - VisualMill 5.0 offers much more options, like CAD and 5-axis milling. The manual is great and shows all functions you need.”

Mr. Hofmann also uses the on-line resources provided by MecSoft Corporation, especially the extremely active web-based users forum. “In case of any questions, the MecSoft technical support team helps you quickly and the user forum is always good to improve knowledge.” he adds.

Additional Benefits
The company also uses VisualMill 5.0 for job time estimation of customer parts from solids, as the speed of the computed tool paths is unparalleled.

VisualMill is capable of reading data from bad IGS Files, which sometimes fail to load with higher end CAD systems.

MecSoft’s integration of VisualMill with Rhino-CAD has been an enormous step to help increase productivity from design to part with no interface issues.

Art to Part

Price/Performance:
“Best of all”, says Mr. Hofmann, “is surely the unbeaten price of the system. All the required posts are included and can be very easily configured by the user as well. With the perfect customer support (that comes at no extra cost) of questions answered within a day, I'm sure, my decision to go with VisualMill was the right one and I can only but recommend this product.

Machined parts programmed in VisualMill