How CAD made design less of a grind at Carborundum

Replacing manual drawing boards, British CAD software developers CADlogic installed their parametric CAD system paraCAD+ at Carborundum Abrasives GB in March 1997

For generations the name Carborundum has been synonymous with excellence in grinding and sharpening, with the manufacture of abrasive products to grind, polish and hone surfaces to fine tolerances.

Having started up in the USA during the 1880s, in 1895, at Niagara Falls, Carborundum built its first grinding wheels factory for which Ford nearby was the major customer for finishing its crankshafts and camshafts.

In 1908, the company set up a plant in Duesseldorf.

From 1913, the British arm of Carborundum moved up from London to Trafford Park, Manchester, again in order to supply grinding media to the local Ford operation, where the famous Model T car was being built.

In a sea change in 1984, Carborundum Abrasives GB and other European units bought themselves out of the US-based Carborundum group.

Nowadays the ten-acre facility at Trafford Park, where thousands once worked, employs around 350 people and has a consolidated turnover of over GBP 80 million (for year 1999/2000).

It houses an immense range of presses from one ton right up to 2500 tons per sq in for moulding grinding wheels.

Among present customers are numbered such famous names as Gillette for razor blades, Rolls Royce for aero engines and of course Ford.

The company has continually met the challenges of working closely with machine tool OEM's, of incorporating new materials and of fulfilling ever more exacting design and production requirements.

This includes the rapid generation of meticulously precise paper drawings for the shopfloor upon which all the tooling and manufacturing are based.

Replacing manual drawing boards, British CAD software developers CADlogic installed its parametric CAD system Paracad+ at Carborundum Abrasives GB in March 1997.

The system is utilised for the design and draughting of moulds for Carborundum's bonded range of grinding and polishing wheels, bonded segments and honing stones.

Now an impressive total of more than 1200 drawings is held in Paracad+.

There are around 40 distinct basic shapes of bonded wheels.

When you specify the style of wheel and then enter values for its salient features such as thickness, diameter, radius, hole size, angles and peripheral shape, the powerful interactive parametrics in Paracad+ draws up the mould instantly before your eyes.

As a safeguard if any engineering limit is reached or breached, that value can be flagged up with a warning.

Meanwhile, through associativity, any cross-hatching is automatically redrawn to fit.

By calculating the volume of material used, the system also provides vital downstream manufacturing and costing information.

Also designed on Cadlogic's CAD system are moulds for making bonded segments, which are blocks of abrasives moulded into specific shapes.

Here are some 25 fundamental types, the parameters of which are again varied to generate the exact configuration and size you want.

By their nature, the origination of other Carborundum products, such as coated abrasives and superabrasives, viz cubic boron nitride (CBN) and man-made and natural diamonds, does not have the same need for computer-aided design.

So CAD significantly reduces the man-hours, downtime and cost that Carborundum expends when designing and producing its bonded product moulds, boosting productivity whilst reducing turnround time in the highly competitive machine tool and toolmaking marketplace.

In the toolmaking arena for example (the destination of 15% of company turnover by value), this helps Carborundum's modern grinding technology, with higher grit values, to fight back strongly against the competition of the latest, albeit costly, high-speed machining to micron tolerances as well as spark erosion and straightline cutting by wire EDM.

The Paracad+ system at Carborundum runs on a Pentium 133 computer with 20in screen, outputting to a high-resolution HP Designjet AO plotter and a small inkjet colour printer.

In October 1999, the Technical Department at Carborundum purchased a second seat of paraCAD+, operating it on the platform of a Pentium 450 with 20in screen and A3 HP colour printer.

This has been used both for the conversion of legacy drawings (in some cases going back to the 1920s) into parametric CAD ones and for trying out new factory equipment layouts within the established architecture of the site.

David Frost, the Project Engineer at Carborundum Abrasives GB who is in charge of the CAD installation, says: "By using CADlogic's Paracad+ for all bonded designs, we are much more able to fulfil our customers' demands and expectations for the rapid provision of tailor-made grinding and polishing solutions, whilst maintaining the unerring precision for which the Carborundum name is known the world over.

Wholly produced and supported in the UK, Cadlogic's feature-filled and intelligent, stand-alone CAD system offers interactive parametrics and associativity that give many practical advantages over CAD systems from other vendors".

A free-of-charge demonstration CD of Paracad+ is available from Cadlogic now.

What is more, as for all its CAD software products, Cadlogic provide a technical support hotline to enable contact direct with the software authors, helpful advice for all users.

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