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Investing in the Future — Part 1
Factory 1 has seen the arrival of Trend’s latest piece of capital equipment – a Thermwood 45-712 CNC router.
This is an extremely flexible machine and is capable of machining 2 and 3
dimensional objects in a range of materials from wood to plastics and, aluminium.
The maximum work envelope of the machine is 3660mm long by 2130mm wide by
406mm deep so with a little bit of know-how, a wide variety of differently
shaped objects can be produced using this machine.
The router has been installed within its own room in a similar fashion to
the Glassjet printer in Factory 6. This room contains the router and its vacuum
pump has an interlocked door so that no one will be able to get into the room
while the machine is running.
An external dust extractor has been ducted onto the router through the roof of the room and this will remove nearly all of the swarf and chips that are produced by the machine as it’s cutting. All of this means that the impact of this machine on the rest of the factory in terms of noise and dust is negligible.
Trend has also purchased Mastercam X2 CADCAM software that translates CAD drawings into NC programs that the Thermwood router can use to run. This simplifies greatly the generation of these programs, especially for complicated 3 dimensional items.
It also has a very powerful nesting function that can arrange a number of different parts on a single sheet of material in the most efficient way so as to minimise the scrap generated. This will be especially useful with products such as portlight lenses and other Perspex items.
