“Typically, we are doing one- and two-cavity tools a luxury for us is a four-cavity mold. “We are cutting true microcavities,” said PDC President Mark Kinder. The company manufactures molds and uses them to produce small medical devices, microfluidic circuits and in-vitro labware. (PDC), Scottsdale, Ariz., deals with those challenges every day.
You must be able to remove, check and replace the part without repeating the whole setup process.”Ī micromold machined at Plastic Design is positioned on a Hermann Schmidt magnetic chuck mounted on a unit of System 3R’s Nano reference system. “You then put it back in the machine, make adjustments to your process and continue machining. “In the case of developing or validating a process with small tools or small features, at some stage you have to remove the part and take it to a dedicated metrology device to inspect your results,” said John Bradford, micromachining R&D team leader for Makino Inc., Mason, Ohio. In these systems, workholding pallets feature a centrally located drawbar or stud drawn into a machine-mounted chuck to provide consistent positioning. Zero-point palletizing, or referencing systems, can maximize precision in machining operations. Beyond assembling high-accuracy workholding components, it is crucial to control how they relate to each other as an integrated system, and assure they are applied in a repeatable, systematic manner. But when working with micron-level tolerances, good is not good enough. Generally, a shop can combine good machine tools, vises and tooling to get a good result. By Bill Kennedy, as seen in MICRO ManufacturingĪccurately machining and measuring a part requires it to be located and clamped with precision that matches or exceeds specified final tolerances.