Delcam software speeds Nike prototypes
Nike has introduced a special system aimed at speeding up prototype shoe production at its Oregon Mould & Tooling Center (MTC). The ‘Cruncher’ programming system has its own graphical user interface and has been built on top of PowerMILL – Delcam’s machining software. The new system, which forms part of an investment of over a million dollars in high-speed, high-precision machine tools at MTC, means that if needs be, Nike can now turn out a set of three or four moulds for a new design overnight.
PowerMILL was originally brought into MTC to enable handling ‘point cloud’ data from scanning and digitising and STL files. Both are essential to the reverse engineering methods that Nike relies on to manage the large number of tooling iterations as new designs are developed. The addition of Cruncher means that now blow moulds for airbags in heels are completed in a day instead of a week. As machining is done at very high surface speeds and tight tolerances, no more than fifteen minutes of hand polishing is necessary.
So far, some 80 per cent of the toolpathing process has been automated, with plans underway to build more and more upstream operations into Cruncher such as mould design tasks including generation of parting lines and split surfaces. Currently, some of the simpler jobs do not go through shop programming at all, but instead go from the designers straight to Cruncher and PowerMILL, with mould cutting starting in as little as two hours.
