Electrium has (electrical) designs on Paracad+

Paracad+ is providing a powerful design solution for production tooling at the Electrium Group's plant for domestic consumer products in Manchester.

The PC-based, 2D mechanical engineering design system Paracad+, produced, sold and supported by UK CAD developer Cadlogic, is providing a powerful design solution for production tooling at the Electrium Group's plant for domestic consumer products at Sharston Road, Wythenshawe, Manchester.

Two seats of Paracad+ are used by different engineers for the design of press and mould tools, jigs, fixtures and gauges for the world-famous Wylex and Crabtree ranges of consumer products for circuit protection, switching and distribution, sold on retail parks and high streets all over Britain.

Wylex was founded in 1897 and moved to Wythenshawe from Manchester City Centre in 1934.

The production of Crabtree Circuit Protection was transferred to the location in 1997 from Crabtree's Lincoln Works site at Walsall.

Wylex and Crabtree are among seven major electrical brands manufactured by Electrium.

The other five are: Appleby, Britmac, Marbo, Supelec and Volex Accessories.

Electrium achieved a management buyout from Hanson in April 1997 with equity from its principal investor Cinven and now employs 1500 people in production operations in the UK and worldwide.

The first seat at Manchester, used solely by Senior Tooling Engineer Graham Hodgkiss, was purchased to design in-house tooling and to import press and mould tool drawings from subcontractors for viewing and modification.

Tools are maintained, modified and refurbished in-house, and all tooling drawings are kept strictly up-to-date to ensure compliance with British Standards.

The second seat is installed on a shared PC, used by six engineers on an occasional basis for designing jigs and fixtures when required.

This versatile station runs Cadlogic's Archcad+, a multilayered architectural extension to Paracad+, too, purchased in 1995 for preparing new factory and office layouts as well as for showing existing plans such as security and fire ("means-of-escape").

The Archcad+ add-on has at GBP 500 proved invaluable for planning shopfloor reorganisations, rationalisations and refurbishments, notably without interrupting the cellular production.

These have reflected Electrium's policy of continuously reviewing and improving manufacturing efficiencies, as well as increasing the flexibility to bring new products onto the market as fast as possible.

The key technical benefit of Paracad+ is its use of interactive parametrics.

When users specify the style and enter the dimensions they want, parametrics draws up any item instantly.

Then the intelligence built into Paracad+ gives it full associativity, which will recalculate and update a whole drawing - including dimensions and cross-hatching - when a single piece of its geometry is altered.

What is more, Paracad+ includes mechanical symbol libraries and a host of construction routines to make complex drawing tasks really easy.

A good illustration of these points among Electrium's tooling design applications is the way in which Paracad+ controls parametric hole arrays, set up from its standard library of dowel and tapped hole etc, symbols.

The system automatically generates the drill table direct from the drawing once the symbols have been placed.

That table may either be exported to a file or placed on the drawing.

Associativity inherent in Paracad+ allows the user to recalculate and revise the entire drawing as these symbols are added or removed.

Ballooning (labelling) routines similarly enable engineers to automatically create and update bills of materials, writing them to external files or to tables next to the drawing.

Meanwhile a "notes view" helpfully provides for storage within the drawing file of other information relevant to his project which the user does not necessarily wish to display on the drawing itself.

That text is easily cut and pasted between Windows applications.

All such features of Paracad+ add up to major benefits in the speed, productivity, precision and quality of the tooling design.

Both the workstations run on Dell PC's, networked to a number of Hewlett-Packard printers and one HP 750+ A0-size colour plotter.

Senior Tooling Engineer Graham Hodgkiss, who first specified and now manages the Paracad+ system, first heard of it just before its launch on 1st November 1994 - through an article in a UK CAD trade magazine.

He has found the 2D software powerful, economical and very easy to learn (a significant point for the six infrequent users) - providing the familiar Windows interface and file import/export compatibility with Autocad.

And, since 1994, the enclosures he has designed have become progressively more complex to accommodate ever more sophisticated technology.

Product service and support for Paracad+, with a contract for regular updates and maintenance, have been efficient and reliable, delivered locally by Cadlogic as an independent CAD developer headquartered in Britain not overseas.

Also on the shopfloor at Wythenshawe, Steve Tew of Cadlogic wrote a parametric tooling design program for a CNC Variform wire-bending machine built and installed four years ago by Pave Automation Design and Development of Peterborough.

Hodgkiss was responsible for introducing this wire-forming machine onto the site, resulting in significant cost savings.

Cadlogic's tooling parameters in this case relate both to materials and configurations.

The innovative process forms and cuts off polyester-coated copper or steel wire of up to 8mm diameter for use as neutral links.

The old method of fitting PVC sleeves to the components later had been laborious and prone to leave air gaps.

Meanwhile Electrium executes all visualisation and development of the electrical products themselves at Wythenshawe on Pro/Engineer, a 3D solid modelling system running on four PCs.

This system will also importantly ensure the fit between parts and detect any interference.

Then 2D files of new products are exported from the Pro/Engineer, via DXF file transfer, to the other side of the design office to production engineers, who stand ready to design all the necessary mould and press tools on Paracad+.

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