Cool cost cutting: Safety, Standards & Compliance

Article by JetCAM International

Founded in 1974, I-Cherng Refrigeration Industrial Co. Ltd. manufactures heat exchangers for refrigeration products. In 1995, the Taiwanese company purchased JetCAM Expert nesting software from Monaco-based JetCAM International SARL for I-Cherng’s Finn-Power Shear Genius punch press.

“Our first impression was that the JetCAM interface was very user-friendly,” said I-Cherng Senior Engineer Ian Yo.

Since that purchase of JetCAM, I-Cherng has bought several more CNC punch and laser machines, including a Finn-Power SG6 and LP6. With each purchase, I-Cherng has added a post-processor to its JetCAM license, and four years ago the manufacturer obtained two additional seats of JetCAM Expert.

Less than a year ago, I-Cherng acquired an Amada FLC 4020AJ fiber laser, which was supplied with alternative programming software. Problems were encountered immediately with the software.

“We chose the Amada to improve our quality and productivity, having had previous positive experience with their machines,” Yo said. “However, the original software supplied with the machine did not consider the characteristics of fiber laser cutting and still appeared to use CO₂ laser logic. There were many unnecessary codes in the NC programs. Also, it was not user-friendly. Staff had to spend time deleting unnecessary codes, and some programs could not cut the parts well. We could easily spend over four hours to modify the NC code in order to get it to run on the machine.”

The following month, I-Cherng contacted JetCAM to ask if a post-processor was available for the machine. The answer was yes, so the post was installed remotely and the JetCAM Expert nesting software was upgraded to version 20 across the company’s three licenses.

Further tweaks were made remotely to the post-processor to accommodate I-Cherng’s requirements and machine configurations, with test parts cut using NC from both JetCAM and the originally supplied software for comparison. Yo said the resulting NC that was generated automatically from JetCAM was much shorter.

The Amada FLC 4020AJ fiber laser machine at I-Cherng Refrigeration Industrial. Image courtesy of JetCAM International