Euromold 2009

The 4th of december I paid a visit to the Euromold in Frankfurt. The Euromold is all about prototyping, mold making and so on. Visit http://www.euromld.com for more info. What makes Euromold interesting for Solid Shapes™ are the machinery and software for making prototypes and one-offs. The number of 3D-printer companies was even bigger then on the previous edition of Euromold. Although very interesting, at the moment Solid Shapes™ is not looking for those types of machines, maybe later on in our existence there ’ll be a business case for it. 

The main reason I went was to see some 5-axes CNC action and talk to some CAD and CAM software companies. Besides these I hoped to see some CNC action with robots. I was actually quite surprised that besides some very small set-ups there where actually none. Although there are some interesting developments on this front there where no integrators selling them, at least not on the Euromold. Luckily there where more then enough CNC-setups to look at - mainly machines working with aluminium for the mold industry -. 

My interest went out to the machines of Maka and CMS. A German and a Italian brand of 5-axis CNC machines. I had a appointment with the people from Maka where they explained the demo machine to me. Later on I paid a visit to the CMS boot which has kind of the same machines. I personally feel both are quite competitive to each other. 

On the software side I had a appointment with the very nice guys of solidThinking which is a very intuitive CAD program http://www.solidthinking.com. I already had e-mail contact with them and the good thing about them is that you get in direct contact with the people who actually built the software. On the booth they presented my with a good demo and explanation. Later on I visited the boots of Delcam, Masterwood, hyperMill, Siemens and others. I also had a demo of Alias Design from Autodesk and had some discussions with them about the interface and the way of working in Alias which to me seems a bit out dated. On the other hand I’ve heard about the integration of Alias Design features into AutoCAD and Inventor. There are some very nice movies of Inventor Fusion on the web http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/fusion/.