What kind of parts do we make?
Not so easy to describe. I basically head up and own an R@D company that mainly develops new 3D machine vision technologies (products to be released early 2009). The software will mainly be used by the film/television and video games development market but we are also interested in MCAD reverse engineering apps. The products we need to prototype range considerably in design from very advanced stereo photogrammetric medium format digital cameras, (camera of our own design), [the design would not look out of place on the set of 2001 (space odessey); we also have 3d stereo dynamic camera recording systems that are aimed more at industrial recording and video games market, and the cameras have more organic shapes that would not look out of place on the set of Battle Star Galactica (the new one).
A lot of the forms or blanks will be cut on lathe as long aspect parabolic tapers, and the
other features will be introduced/cut on the fourth axis. It is possible to come close to our initial designs using a 2 1/2D indexed approach. However, we are interested in simultaneous 3 axes where one of the axes is a horizontally mounted rotary axis, i.e the Y axis on the mill does not move and stays on centre.
We have the capability to redesign certain aspects of the product to aid easier or more efficient machining without significantly compromising the look of the product.
After initial prototyping and short pilate runs we either aim to hand production to large local shop that makes parts for eclipse aviation, or we may decide depending on demand to build more extensive machining facilities to produce the cameras ourselves. We have been looking at Siemens PLM and NX CAM Express, but feel that the way that Siemens is structured may be a very bad fit for our company and it seems very difficult to get the technical information we need from them regarding their product.
Cheers,
Eric  |