Mike Puckett's Blog

On The Road....

While I'm certainly not the most traveled guy, I'm embarking on my third trip this year.  I'm off to Vienna Austria for four days, and then onto Freudsthadt Germany for five days.  At our company we have two Arbugh Molding Machines that we use for testing and production runs of our molds.  Attached to one of our machines is a Wittmann Robot that is used to remove parts from the tool.  Each year Arburg hosts their Technology Days where they open their factory to showcase their products, and to also demo different molding technologies.  So that were we will be in Germany.  Wittmann's world headquarters are in Vienna, so they invited us to go there first for four days, and they would put us up in a hotel and take us on a tour of their factory, and of the surrounding areas.

One problem has arisen though.  Being a native to Southern California, I have never been outdoors while it is snowing.  So how will I get to experience my fist snow?  The weather forcast for Germany is snow all five days we are there, and temps in the low 30's to low 40's!  While California has a ton of quirks, I'm sure going to miss the weather for the next nine days!

Anyhow, I will have my laptop with me, and each hotel offers wireless service, so I will post up some pics and stories along the way.

Fun With Solidworks

Thinking of Solidworks as primarily a work tool, one would wonder what kind of fun can be had with it?  One of the biggest ways is to enter the Solidworks Design Contest.  This contest allows users to submit an entry into one of three categories: Models, Photoworks Images, and Animations.  The contest opens annually in December, and accepts entries up until the following November, and the winners are announced at the Solidworks World Convention.  The prizes normally amount to over $150,000 in cad based workstations and gear.  Entries for the contest that will be announced at Solidorks World 2008 are already being accepted.

Another fun way of using Solidworks is to enter Rob Rodriguez'  monthly Photoworks Contest .  A different model is selected from 3D Content Central each month.  Its then up to each entrant to place the model into a scene in photoworks.  The submitted entries are then voted on by web users to Rob's site, and the winner receives a prize from a range of products.

So even though these are contests, technically you still have to work to participate in them.  So whats a Solidworks based way to have some plain old fun work killing time?  How about Solidworks Paper Pilot?  Use your skills as a top notch paper airplane designer to compete in a throwing distance contest, and then go for the challenge.

Work doesnt have to be another four letter word.  These are a few ways to help break the monotony of what can otherwise be a dull time.

3 Molds in 3 Weeks, Why Not?

I believe it was Jeff Ray at SW World this year that said engineers love a challenge.  Well he is right.  So when a challenge arises, we use the tools at our disposal to complete that challenge, and feel good that we were able to do it.

We received a call from a customer on Thursday who wanted to know if we could build them 3 duplicate 2-cavity lens molds in about 3 weeks.  After meeting with them the next day the game was on to get the design completed and ready for the shop on the following Monday just 3 days later.  The personal goal was to have it complete in 2 days to allow for those always fun changes management requests.

One of the biggest components of a mold design is the mold base itself.  In my previous post I talked about using available models from manufacturers.  We have been using Omni Mold Systems for about 2 years with great success.  After a quick call to Dave at Omni to make sure they had a certain base in stock, the next step was to grab their CD catalog.  After browsing to the correct folder, it was a simple drag and drop, and my mold base was in Solidworks, and ready to go.  This was about a 3 minute process in total.  Without this ability, there would have been at least a day or two worth of mold base modeling alone!

So after a busy Friday afternoon, and an unscheduled work day on Saturday, the design gets finished, and now its up to the guys in the shop to pull it off.  Will we succeed, we will know for sure in about 3 weeks!