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Goetz Marine Technology CompositesCNC Milling Machine Produces Precisely
Shaped, Perfectly
By: Ben Sprague, Marketing Director |
tops of the templates. This required a skilled
operator because it was easy to dip below the templates in the area in
between them.
After one side was carved, carbon fiber was placed on that side and allowed to set. The next day, the piece was flipped over so the other half could be carved. It too was covered with carbon fiber and once it hardened, the two halves were joined. A pocket for the post was cut into the blade with a hand saw and the post was bonded into place with glue. The drawback to this method was that because the foam core was cut by hand, accuracy was only possible to about four or five mm. This approach was also somewhat slow, taking about 16 hours to produce a part. About six years ago, GMT purchased Techno-Isel's CNC milling machine with the Mac100 controller to improve accuracy and reduce production time. This system was chosen because it was the most affordable and highly accurate. The machine has a resolution of 0.0005 inches which is about 100 times the precision that can be achieved by hand. Other points in its favor were its ease of use and compatibility with all the leading CAM packages. Now, after GMT receives instructions from a yacht designer, the rudder production process proceeds this way: first, Gary Crosby, who is in charge of rudder production, re-creates the blade in a software program called KeelCAM. This program was created specifically for modeling foil-shaped objects by John Letcher of AeroHydro Corp. in Maine. To model a rudder blade in KeelCAM, the designer enters points along the leading and trailing edges of the blade in a grid format. Then he builds a table of numbers as an ASCII file from which the software generates the plan form and the foil offsets for the foil shapes that run up and down the blade. Usually, the designer will enter half a dozen foil shapes up and down the blade, and let the computer smooth them out to produce the finished shape. The smoothed blade produced by KeelCAM becomes the cutting file for the Techno router. The data describing the plan form of the rudder blade is transferred into the machine's Mac100 controller. The Techno is a three-axis machine with a Z-axis travel of 11 inches. It has a work envelope of 40" x 40". However, most rudders are longer than that so the router is programmed to carve 40 inches at a time. The cutting bit is a 1-¾" ball mill on a 2-½ hp router. The carving stroke is in the fore and aft direction. The step-over is about 15 mm, which leaves little scallops that are smoothed out by hand. After one half is carved, the foam is laminated. As in the manual process, the rudder builder shapes a plywood cradle that sits on top of that half of the blade. The purpose of the cradle is to make sure the piece sits flat on the machine's table when it is turned over. The other side is then carved and laminated and from there the process proceeds as it did in the past. Most rudders can be carved in three 40" cutting sessions. Each session requires between 120 and 130 passes and takes about 20 minutes. Usually, the carving for one side of the blade is done in about four hours which includes setup time. Programming time depends on quality of information provided by the yacht designer. Generally, it takes two to three hours for programming and getting the cutting files ready. Therefore, the automated method typically takes about 10 or 11 hours to produce the finished blade. Compared to the 16 hours required by the manual approach, this is a beneficial time savings, but the real benefit of the automated method is that it creates very accurate rudder blades. The Techno router also allows exact duplicates to be made for spares or testing. The Techno router has four ground and hardened steel shafts and eight recirculating bearings in each axis. This shaft and bearing system produces very smooth play-free motion which produces high-quality cuts. Also, the router has anti-backlash ball screws for play-free motion that make it possible to produce circles that are accurate to the 0.0005 inch machine resolution. For a rudder blade that is two meters tall and 500-600 mm fore to aft, GMT is now delivering blades with 1/2 mm accuracy. Compared to the four to five mm accuracy they were getting, this is a substantial improvement. The Techno machine is sometimes used in the production of keels, as well. However, its primary use is for producing rudders to the precise specifications required for racing boats. In fact, GMT has an impressive list of boats outfitted with its rudders, including several in this year's America's Cup race, although due to the highly competitive nature of the event it is not possible to specify which boats at this time. To boat designers, GMT's highly accurate production process and knowledge of advanced composites is the combination they trust for critical composite parts, making them the preferred supplier. |
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