PEP Nesting Shop Floor Lasers

These critical programming tasks are also essential when it comes to quoting. Quoting the job one way and then cutting it another makes no sense and makes it hard to compute whether a profit is made. To be accurate, the quote has to reflect the way that the parts will eventually be cut or the profit margins will be off. Can you provide an example or two of howPEP increases cutting speed and material savings? The first example that comes to mind is a case where a customer was looking to justify the cost of three new fiber lasers In the common cutting example seen in Figure 2, parts are 210 in. long and have a 1/2 in. radius on all four corners. Prior to the upgrade, multiple CAM products were put to the test, but all of them failed to common cut those parts. The failures were, in part, due to the time constraints placed on programmers. It’s often too time consuming for the programmer to set parameters, create nests, edit the nests and set up the common cutting manually. It’s important to mention that the type of common cutting we’re discussing isn’t the expected type – usually carried out only in situations with rectangular parts with sharp corners. Instead, the focus is on what PEP customers have come to expect: common cutting on a wide range of part sizes and geometry types. The truth of the situation is that no one common cut path will work for all types and rotations of a part. Common cut scenarios are complex, which means the analysis and the solution need to be carried out by the software. Because we have been perfecting and automating different cutter paths for more than 25 years, the automation of the process allows PEP customers to common cut a variety of parts reliably in seconds. Why is it so important to complete every programming task in regard to ROI? More than a dozen critical CAM processes must be done 100 percent of the time. If the programmer is not doing all of them, then a laser runs 20 to 40 percent slower. In addition to slow cutting, head crashes and poor cut quality are eliminated when all the critical programming tasks are completed 100 percent of the time. Therefore, when beam on-time goes up and the laser is cutting faster, 20 to 30 percent increases in laser throughput can be realized. 40 January/February 2018 Figure 2. Prior to upgrading to PEP Technology, these 210-in.-long parts were unable to be common cut. The new software, however, had no issue nesting these large parts for common cutting.