“One of the biggest advantages of ESPRIT is the way it lets us validate the program on a computer screen rather than tying up a much more expensive machine tool … mistakes can take a considerable amount of expensive machine time to diagnose and correct. With ESPRIT, we can find them in the simulation. This helps explain why nearly every part that we program works perfectly the first time we run it on the machine.”

--- Marvin Saucer, manufacturing engineer and CAD/CAM programmer for IMTEC Swiss

Dental implants represent a complex computerized numerical control (CNC) machining challenge because of their intricacy, close tolerances, and small size. IMTEC Swiss Mfg. Inc. programmers would historically spend three to four days writing G-Code for Marubeni Citizen-Cincom Swiss CNC machines, and another day or two on the machine, troubleshooting the program.

The Ardmore, Okla., company recently switched to ESPRIT, which uses solid modeling to automate the geometry definition process and allows operations to be moved from one spindle to another by simply dragging them across a computer screen.

“The new software has taken the drudgery out of programming and has cut the time needed to write and set up the typical program to less than one day,” Saucer said.

IMTEC Swiss is a wholly owned manufacturing division of IMTEC Corporation, a dental specialty products manufacturer/marketer.