ONGAA CAM for Wood CNCs

Vacuum loss while machining is a real problem. Vacuum drops with each pierce and cut. Since the coefficient of friction is based on the area of the part, smaller parts are the most affected. Unfortunately, the lateral force applied only varies by material and feed so what was ok for large parts may not work at all for small parts.

Step one is to ensure that there are no machine vacuum leaks and than the spoilboard edges are seals etc. Here are several strategies that will help with the movement problem. Two of these strategies try to conserver vacuum for when it needed most and the third reduced the force feed.

Option 1: Conserve vacuum by not cutting through the material.

Leave an ‘onion skin’ to reduce the amount of air passing through the spoilboard. Parts hold more firmly. Two passed are required to fully cut the parts. The … Read the rest

Working with many parts with many manufacturing steps poses a challenge in keeping things organized.   To have even a fighting chance parts need to be identified – labeled – to ensure that everyone know what the part is.

Even with the sophisticated – ‘123-4567’ / project-part numbering scheme we very often need more information and to ensure that the next person knows what to do.

ONGAA CAM has expanded its label printing capabilities in Nesting to support not only the following information:

• Project with Sheet number
• seq# and Part Number/Name
• Dimensions
• Material Name

An now also include up to 8 Solidworks custom properties and a dedicated ‘Barcode’ source property.  An image of the part itself can also be placed on the label.

Supported encodings are 1-D  (3of9 barcode), 2-D QR Code and 2-D Data Matrix.

In the above example, the first custom property indicates the edge banding color and sides … Read the rest

With many facilities using multiple software packages to program/optimize/nest it gets hard to keep track of what parts were actually programed and which were not.

Many shops use Cut Rite for the simple rectangles and WoodWOP for the more complex components.  We see this as the best of both worlds — except that its gets messy keeping the parts straight.  Cut Rite ‘wants’ a file with dimensions or a MRP to load dimensions and WoodWOP definitely wants a program.

ONGAA CAM can now take the tedium out of programming the ‘regular’ rectangles automatically, whether or not you have made allowance for edge banding in the Solidworks parts or not.

With both ‘Edgeband Size Vars’ and ‘Add Nesting Contour’ turned on, ONGAA CAM will automatically create a ‘bounding-box’ contour and associated a Vertical Route process with it.  All process options are configurable including Tool, direction, compensation, approach and even ‘midline start’.… Read the rest

The ONGAA CAM nesting interface has been improved to provide easier manual movement of parts as well as allowing renestiong of single sheets (in a multi sheet nests).

USER INTERFACE

The initial view of the nest remains the same with the first 4 sheets displayed.  By double clicking on any sheet a full screen view of the sheet is displayed.  Both the initial 4 sheet and the single sheet now includes the sheet scrap material and also left and right mouse button drag & drop movement.  If the sheet boundary is exceeded both the part and the sheet scrap boundary are highlighted to indicate this.

RENESTING

An option has been added to allow renesting of a single sheet for those times when then nesting strategy works for most sheets but not all.

The renest option also allows you to resize the ‘working area’ of a sheet and/or change the strategy … Read the rest

With the release of 1.3.12 of ONGAA CAM for Biesse, the optional nesting module is now available.

The Nesting Option provides the ability to nest complete assemblies at one time. Nesting features include 8 fill/nest options auto nesting, grain alignment, manual moves after auto nesting, tool change / free motion optimization and automatic sheet splitting based on named material and material thickness.  Up to 99 sheets can be nested at one time.  When sheet splitting is used, each material ‘sheet size’ can be selected from a sheet library.

Different options can be tried while in preview and once satisfied the layouts can be ‘Accepted’.  Printed layout sheets are also available.

A nested program is created for each sheet as a standard BPP program.  This allows the operator to make ‘on the shop floor’ changes without the need to regenerate the files etc.  This is particularly useful when tools need to … Read the rest

ONGAA CAM Nesting now integrates to the WoodPrint Label Printing allowing part information to be printed (and place) directly on the parts.

Basic part dimensions and part names plus 4 SolidWorks Custom properties and well as 4 additional custom properties intended for edge banding information are available.

With WoodPrint feature activated, ONGAA CAM produces the complete set on nested MPRs, Part MPRs and Part Images as required by WoodPrint and referred to by the CSV and PNX using the prescribed naming conventions.

The Weeke Vantech Concept series machine nesting CNC machines with the material handling option and label printing take full advantage of the WoodPrint integration by ONGAA CAM.  ONGAA CAM provides the following details for woodprint automatically at time of nesting.

• Part Name
• Part ID (WoodPrint identifier)
• Part Length, Width, Thickness
• Assembly Name
• 4 User definable Custom properties retrieved from SOLIDWORKS
• 4 User definable Custom properties retrieved from