Staying with the programming theme, there have been some things that we’ve done here at Makino. Historically, we do turnkeys for a lot of our customers; we’ve done around 450 different part configurations for our customers. I have a lot of experience with processing and programming, myself. One of the things we do is put Safe Star programming techniques into all of our turnkey projects and what this does is to eliminate errors when we start programs. Often times, for one reason or another, as you know on the manufacturing floor, there would be a need to restart a program from somewhere midway through the part program.  When that event occurs, there's always a higher risk of something going wrong. We want to eliminate those risks and eliminate those errors by putting a Poka-yoke process in.

What we do is use something called a safety line. The first line of the program is a safety line and the safety line establishes conditions under which the CNC will operate. There's an example down below of a safety line that would be put into the beginning of a part program. The safety line then should also be located before each tool change, which will allow an operator to safely restart programs.

The reason for this is a safety line will cancel out and establish kind of a baseline condition for the machine tool at every tool change. Then, with the new tool in your part program you're going to be establishing and re-establishing the conditions in which you want the machine to operate with this new tool, in terms of your offsets, work offsets, your tool offsets, cut radius compensation—whether you're running an inch or metric motor, all of these different G-codes. It’s easy to do this and it can go a long way in terms of eliminating errors that might occur if you have to start midway in a part program, which often occurs as we all know in a real manufacturing environment. This is a Poka-yoke process that we at Makino have put into all of our programs to eliminate errors. Again, it’s to reduce cost and all the things that are associated with errors in the manufacturing process.

We have another slide to review that is useful in high speed machining processes. This is a little bit different than the other things that we’ve been talking about so far because this is actually a technology built into the servo motion control system of the machine tools. It is a Makino feature called, “Geometric Intelligence.”  I think it qualifies as an error proofing process is because for high speed machining.

Typically, you’re machining at feed rates anywhere from 100 inches a minute to 300 to 500 inches a minute. It is with aluminum you can machine at those kind of feed rates and, often times, it’s going to be in some kind of a hog out situation in the aerospace industry, like an air frame component, or where there's a lot of material to be removed. Geometric Intelligence, what we call GI.3 or the version three of the software capability, becomes less operator and programmer dependent to produce a good part at the feed rate you desire. 

To explain this a little bit more, my slide has four different columns. The one on the left says, ‘Radical Mode,’ and the one on the right is ‘Ultra Precision Mode, and there's an M code associated with each one of those. The reason it’s an error proofing process is you can chose the M code and basically program the machine to perform at the level you need for a given application. 

For example, if I’m machining an aerospace airframe component and I've got pocket tolerance from side to side that is plus or minus five thousandths, and that’s somewhat typical in a lot of the air frame components, I want to get material out there just as fast as possible. I can put in my part program an M2-55 which happens to be what we call, ‘Radical Mode.’  I’m not terribly concerned with the accuracy, but I am concerned with going as fast and removing as much metal in the least amount of time as possible to reduce my cycle time. I can program and run the machine under M2-55. 

Now, if I’ve got a feature in that part where I need to hold a much closer tolerance, of a half a thousandths on pocket size, I don’t want to do that. I can simple program the machine, again with an M code to say, ‘Okay, I want to hold a very tight tolerance.’ What that means to the machine tool, considering the inertia and everything of the machine, the machine will operate and this is when the intelligence part of the feature is called. It will operate to obtain the tolerances that you’ve programmed the machine to achieve. 

And, it takes no judgment from the programmer in order to achieve this. The programmer can still write in 500 inches a minute, but he’s still going to get ultra precision if he programs the machine to perform that way. The machine’s not going to run 500 inches a minute, but it’s going to do what it needs to do to achieve a tolerance programmed into the part program. 

The reason this falls into error proofing is that a programmer can make a judgment that will later be proved incorrect and cause a scrap part or a problem in the finished result. The machining result of that part with the GI function means that all the programmer needs to do is put in the proper M code based on the accuracy that he or she needs, and the machine does the rest and an error is very unlikely. That’s why this belongs in the error proofing discussion we’re having today.