Burintekh, a developer and manufacturer of tools for the drilling and maintenance of oil, gas and mining wells, has added Delcam’s FeatureCAM feature-based CAM system to help the company cope with the ever-increasing complexity of its customers’ designs and the constant pressure for faster delivery.
Burintekh, which was founded in 1999, has a modern production base equipped with the latest equipment, including a range of multi-axis machining centres, and effective quality control at all stages of production. This allows the company to manufacture a wide range of competitive products, meeting all the requirements and wishes of its most demanding customers. For its achievements, Burintekh was awarded the honorary title of “Best Industrial Company of the Republic of Bashkortostan” in 2009.
As part of its development programme, the company acquired several new turning, milling and five-axis machines during 2011 and 2012. The next stage was to add a powerful and versatile CAM system that could unleash the full potential of the new production equipment. FeatureCAM was chosen because it could provide fast, automated programming for the full range of machine tools at Burintekh.
Among the most challenging projects undertaken by the company is the manufacture of roller-cone drill bits for tools used in drilling oil and gas wells. The manufacture of this type of product on CNC machines requires the development of highly-complex machining programs. These programs would be almost impossible to create without the use of a modern CAM system but are handled easily in FeatureCAM, according to Arthur Islamgulov, the engineer at Burintekh responsible for the full complement of machine tools.
The first stage is to turn blanks of the basic shape on a lathe. CNC milling of the detailed design is then carried out on a five-axis machine tool. FeatureCAM is first used to generate toolpaths for each size of tooth within the drill design. It then duplicates the various programs as required to produce toolpaths for all the other teeth. Once the complete program has been created, the shape produced by FeatureCAM can be compared with the original 3D model of the part to ensure that the whole design will be produced within tolerance.
As well as appreciating the benefits of his FeatureCAM software, Mr. Islamgulov praised the support from the technical experts at Delcam Ural. “One of the key factors in our successful deployment of our FeatureCAM software has been the regular technical support from Delcam Ural,” he said. “Senior Support Engineer, Alexander Dementiev, provided us with an excellent level of training, and followed that up with timely and high-quality support for even our most complex tasks.”
One particularly important area for assistance was modifying the standard FeatureCAM post-processors to match exactly the equipment at Burintekh. This was initially carried out soon after FeatureCAM was first purchased. However, improvement of these post-processors is still being carried out because, with the passage of time, the users within the company learn about new functions in their machines and, of course, they have a desire to use these options.
