With the recent opening of our Sheetmetal division, we’ve had a chance to apply our 4o+ years of learning as a business to an entirely new venture.
While we’ve been making sheetmetal products for the entire lifetime of Viking, we haven’t been offering this as a service until now.
Cutting Direct from 3D Models
This has been a challenge for many years in the sheetmetal industry. With the popularity of 3D CAD software such as Solidworks and Inventor, many engineering businesses are designing everything on their computers. Traditionally, most laser-cutting machines will take a 2D Flat-Pattern of a sheetmetal part, in the form of a DXF or DWG file.
Having to export these files from 3D to 2D for every single part is tedious. If the responsibility for exporting these files lies on the engineering business, it becomes a huge time-sink for their employees. If the sheetmetal service provider does this for them, it comes at additional cost.
How do we solve this?
Metalix
Viking decided to purchase licenses of Metalix’s CAD/CAM Sheetmetal package several years ago, and we’ve found huge benefit in using this to drive our laser-cutting and press machines.
Metalix AutoNest – Nested Flat Patterns from 3D Models
Upon opening the sheetmetal division, we began to automate this process even further. We can now take 3D Models directly from a customer along with a bill of materials (BoM), and using the Metalix package go directly to manufacture.
Metalix takes in 3D models of various formats, recognises whether bending is required, and automatically generates flat-patterns for the laser.
Metalix MBend – 3D Visualisation of Bent Part & Required Tooling
The MBend add-on performs a similar task for our press machines, turning 3d Models directly into press-programs that are sent to the machines. This removes the need for our operators to manually programme each step (a tedious process), and even selects appropriate press tooling from our catalogue.
This Add-on, like the the rest of the package, will take many 3D formats such as .STEP, Parasolids (.X_T) along with most native outputs from CAD packages such as Solidworks and Inventor (.SLDPRT & .IPT).
Our Promise
With all this technology, we will save you exceptional amounts of time if you come to us with your sheetmetal needs. Automation helps us to keep pricing competitive, with lead-times generally a matter of days.
Lastly, because we manufacture directly from your 3D model, you can be sure that the parts will be made exactly as intended.
If you have a project you’re interested in discussing with us then get in touch today!
Talk to a Viking
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