Solidcam İmachining Halves cycle Times and Makes Cutters Last 5 Times Longer For Mill-turn Operations At Dixons Surgical

Since 1948, Dixons Surgical in Wickford, Essex has been manufacturing reuseable surgical instruments. As the market has matured, Dixon Surgical has now progressed to making more complex orthopedic instruments, modelled in CAD. These changes encouraged the company to invest in both SolidWorks and SolidCAM, including its revolutionary iMachining module.

Jay Dixon, Managing Director says, “We have been using CNC machining since the early ‘90s. Programming was either manual or on-machine conversational. Now we have standardised on Mazak machines, including a Quick Turn Nexus 200 MSY, which has milling, Y-axis and sub spindle, and a VCN 410A vertical machining centre. During 2010 we started to get requests for parts which were difficult to program on the machine, especially the mill- turn, and which were already modelled in 3D, so we started to look for a suitable CAM system.”

Dixon Surgical had already invested in SolidWorks from Cadtek Systems Ltd, so it was looking for a package which would integrate with it and which would also be able to program its mill-turn machines. Jay Dixon continues, “We rapidly appreciated the benefits of 3D CAD for both new and existing parts. The parametric tools inside SolidWorks allow us to model just one part of a family of parts and, with a parametric table, automatically create the multiple versions, common in our industry. Our two main criteria for a CAM system – seamless integration in SolidWorks and the ability to program our Mazak Quick Turn Nexus - eliminated every system we looked at, except SolidCAM.”

SolidCAM is fully integrated inside SolidWorks and allows Dixons Surgical to make just one machining program and use the CAD system’s parametric tables to produce the other variants. Jay Dixon says, “A Ring Fixator instrument we make comes in 12 different sizes and, with other CAM systems we would have had to create a separate model for each variation. SolidCAM really extends the reach of the CAD system. It enables us to design and manufacture the jigs and produce the CNC program for each of the three operations required to machine each Fixator from one CAD model and one CAM program, compounding time saving on top of time saving. It really impressed our machinists when they realised amount of duplication of effort they had avoided!”