Romit uses a spreadsheet to calculate the coordinates and import them into VX where the powerful wireframe and surface modeling tools take over.

Melbourne, FL –Ramix faces daily challenges designing impellers and moulds while their sister company, Romit is responsible for the machining. Because of shortcomings in their existing CAD and CAM systems, Ramix and Romit were forced to outsource a lot of work causing leaking profits. They needed a solution to keep the work in house and fix the problem.

VX CAD/CAM was selected and offered an easy solution that was cost efficient.

Romit Creates Profitable Niche

Romit had been trying to expand into the impeller market but it was a struggle; their old system simply couldn’t handle the complexity.   “We were amazed at how the tools in VX worked,” explains Ramix-Romit director, Auke Sjoerd Tolsma.

“Customers would send difficult 2D drawings and it was easy to quickly construct 3D parts and get them on the mill. This opened the door to modeling and machining impellers.”

Romit often gets no more than a table of coordinates in radials for the complex 3D form of an impeller. They’ll use a spreadsheet to calculate the coordinates and import them into VX where the powerful wireframe and surface modeling tools take over.

“It takes us more time to import and convert the data in our spreadsheet than it does to model an impeller,” Tolsma says.

Machining the impellers is done with VX CAM using up to 5 axis milling. “After the introduction of VX CAD/CAM, we have increased our machining hourly rate by more than 20percent,” he says.  Impeller manufacturing proves to be a specialty which notably increases Romit’s presence in today’s competitive market...and boosts that bottom line.

Romit Maximizes Production

Ramix realized valuable time was being wasted from modeling to mold making. They needed an integrated, automated solution to speed things up.  

“VX’s associativity is a powerful and reliable tool,” says Tolsma, “and that played a big role in our decision to purchase VX software.” Ramix rarely needs 2D drawings because of the seamless integration. They simply send VX CAD models directly to VX CAM.

Tolsma says, “After building up the mold, no time-consuming drafting is wasted before parts can go into production. The parts list is filled in using the assembly manager. In the shop, no time is wasted on punching in the dimensions of pockets or coordinates of holes into the machine. Milling the parts with VX CAM saved us several days of machining time.” The payback has been enormous and the return on investment was just a few months, not years.

Ramix finds that all of VX’s inspection tools work well with solids and open surface models, allowing them to inspect cooling channel clearances.

VX’s Open Shape / Hybrid modeling is another important contribution to Ramix. “As a mold maker we get all kinds of files to work with,” he says.

“Often we receive bad IGES files where surfaces don’t connect, overlap, or are missing completely. Despite these errors, we quickly make good working mould parts without healing the imported file to a solid model. We even help customers improve the design during the construction process.”

Ramix finds that all of VX’s inspection tools work well with solids and open surface models, allowing them to inspect cooling channel clearances. In keeping with this open shape approach, VX Quickmill doesn’t differentiate between surface and solids. That makes it easy to identify the regions that were changed by the customer for re-machining.

Before any metal is cut, VX can do a full simulation of all movements of complex molds. This shows the customer how the mold construction will be realized. Ramix uses the powerful freeform tools of VX every day to calculate and design parting lines and faces for very complex molds.

The orders and machines are humming along at Ramix and Romit and it’s easy to see how satisfied they are with VX CAD/CAM. Every CNC-machine has a shield which proudly proclaims... ‘This Machine is Powered by VX.’