Gaildrof, Germany-Wilhelm Bott GmbH & Co. KG-a leading European manufacturer of factory and service car racking systems founded in 1930-has used CNC machines for its production since the mid-1990s. The company is a supplier of commercial van interiors and storage equipment. It purchased a TRUMPF 6000L punch/laser combination in 2002 and a 5000R punch in 2006; both machines are linked into the company’s material handling system.
In 2006 Bott added TRUMPF SheetMaster support to streamline its production processes. Material was provided to the two SheetMasters by way of a 50m Stopa stock system, with scrap skeletons removed on both machines by the TrumaGrip and then destroyed by the Scrap Shear. For smaller, urgent jobs a standalone Finn-Power punch press completed the production line. For programming solutions the company uses JETCAM (www.jetcam.com), which has always generated 100 percent reliable code.
After the purchase of the new TRUMPF punching machine Bott realized it had more than 20,000 parts that may have to be run on it. Due to all cutting technologies being stored on a single geometry file within JETCAM, all parts could be automatically retooled within seconds for the new machine. In many cases jobs that were nested for the previous punching machines or for punch-only jobs programmed for the combination machine were immediately available for reuse without renesting. Revision control ensured that changes on components were automatically applied to all relevant nests for all machines.
Bott had a need for information on punched parts to be passed to the bending center. The post-processed NC code generated by JETCAM Expert Premium was modified to provide part positions. This was passed from the punch or laser to the stock management system, which in turn instructed the bending cell of the parts location.
Additional functions such as SheetMaster and Grip are easy to adopt and apply to existing nests, and they have an extended number of options for programming the unloading chutes. With special tools such as wheels, multitool, and multishear the user only has to enter the relevant parameters once, the rest is done by the software.
For more information please contact Martin Bailey at [email protected].