International STEP-NC Demonstration, Renton, WA 2009

On May 14-15, 2009, the STEP Manufacturing team (ISO TC184 SC4 WG3 T24) met in Renton, Washington to demonstrate and discuss advanced uses of the STEP-NC AP238 standard. The key goals for this round of demonstrations were to have multiple sites machine the same part from the same AP-238 data, and to show AP-238 can be used for molds.

Boeing hosted machining demonstrations at their Renton facility and gave the group a tour of the 737 production line. Mitutoyo demonstrated touch probe and laser scan measurements in Kirkland at Micro Encoder. Finally, in the following week, the group held technical meetings with SC4 in Parksville BC and discussed a methodology for representing the kinematics of a machine tool model as STEP data.

The key accomplishments for this round of demonstrations were:

• Implementation by Fanuc of AP-238 STEP-NC
• AP-203 Edition 2 annotation tolerances read from Catia
• Part quality measured at Mitutoyo using laser scanner and touch probe
• Moldy parts made from AP-238 data at many locations, on many types of machine.
  • Boeing, USA
  • NIST, USA
  • Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology, USA
  • Al’s Rod Shop, USA
  • KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
  • Scania, Sweden
  • University of Bath, UK

More details are available in the minutes of the meeting [ppt, 450k]

Photo Gallery