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Software 28 MoldMaking Technology January 2015 creating the templates a time- consuming task. Every customer has its own "standards book," typically massive tomes that, as Street puts it, "can require a law degree to read." Moreover, stan- dards vary not just by customer, but also by the type of mold and the intricacies of each individual injection press. For instance, all mold bases from one particular customer might have V-shaped notches that interface with its injec- tion machines. However, other requirements, such as whether to employ electrical plugs or a hot drop, differ from tool to tool. Adding to design complexity is the fact that few press manufac- turers take the same approach to, say, knockout bar connectors or the locations of water fittings, and any given customer might have any number of different presses. Even press make and model don't tell the whole story, because customers with iden- tical machines might set them up differently. Nonetheless, the team recognized that storing this information in the system one time would be far preferable to the previous, painstaking practice of starting from scratch on every new job. However, configuring the templates was only the first step. The company also had to deal with the fact that any given injection press can accommodate a wide range of tool sizes. Having templates for mold bases that meet customer expecta- tions and account for individual press configurations is one thing, Street explains. Re-sizing a base template for every job, a task that would typically require manually adjusting the position of each and every component, is quite another. Plus, there's always the potential of an engineering change altering the dimensions or configuration of the base assembly. "We didn't want some of our top brains spending their time on such tedium," he says. "We wanted them figuring out slides, ejectors and everything else that actually makes the tool work." With input from Sridharan, Unique's design engineers set about developing math- ematical formulas that enable the software to re-size bases with just a few keystrokes. At its essence, this task involved tying one feature to another—move this screw over so much, and an adjacent screw moves to match. "Essentially, everything is formulized, down to the stroke of the springs," Street says. Suffice to say the company's effort paid off. For one, the "smart base" templates limit The left-hand image is an example of a typical mold design at Unique Tool & Gauge. Starting designs with customer-specifc features already in place saves a great deal of time. That's because the engineering team can eliminate redundant operations and focus more on the development of mold cooling and action, shown on the right. Image courtesy of Unique Tool & Gauge and Cimatron. Programming automation didn't stop with CAD. When a design like this is sent to the foor, it is converted into a color-coding scheme that denotes different toolpath strategies for different areas of the mold, thereby stream- lining the process on the CAM side as well. Image courtesy of John Caccese.