NX 7.5 Single Piece Programming

[jgoulet2008]

Hi All,
I'm new to this website, sorry if this is a topic covered in other threads.

My company manufactures knee implants for a customer. The knee implants are patient specific and are machined in one 4-axis milling operation. Being patient specific, I have to make a program for every knee. I do this by saving over an existing file, importing the new solid, re-picking surfaces for the operations and regenerating. It's not hard by any means, but I was just wondering if anyone knew a better way. I'm not really holding out much hope that there is, but you never know.

It takes me about 10-15 minutes to do each knee in the way I just described.

 

[Toost]

I know this isn't much an improvement but you should be able to instead of importing the model add it as a component, i assume that you still need to re-pick the faces unless one can do something smarter by naming the faces and then let the operation reuse the named objects. When the model is a component, it should be a few clicks less to replace it with a different.
Regards,
Tomas

 

[NXherbie]

I would be inclined to follow Toost's suggestion.

Add the single piece-part as a component of your manufacturing-assembly. WAVE-link the Face-Regions and Curve-Edge Boundaries of the model so that your CAM operations refer to these (rather than the model's entities). Notionally, you can Replace your OLD assembly component for the new one and re-map (as necessary) the Linked geometry. Re-Generate your toolpaths and post-process.


NXHerbie
NX7.5

 

[jgoulet2008]

Good suggestions guys, I will give them a try. Thanks!