Sheet metal sub-contractor Ripley Engineering has been a Radan CADCAM system user for the past eight years. During that time it has taken advantage of all developments that ensure its computer-aided design and manufacturing capability keeps pace with each new investment in CNC punching or laser profiling machines.

Based in Basingstoke, it employs 90 people on three sites. Punching and profiling machines are housed in the main workshop along with machines for bending and equipment for fabrication and welding. A second factory has a paint shop and powder coating plant. In the third is a machine shop and assembly areas.

As a sub-contractor Ripley is to be envied on two counts. Firstly it has an impressive list of customers, many of them household names. For these it makes the parts and fabricates the cabinets and enclosures for products ranging from microwave ovens and drinks dispensers to fuel dispensers and parking meters.

Secondly it is to be envied for its sheet metal shop. This is equipped with four state-of-the art Pullmax 126 machines for punching and forming and a Bystronic laser for profiling sheet metal parts. Its two latest 126s have automatic sheet handling that enables them to produce parts round-the-clock unattended.

Its Radan CADCAM system is central to this operation, serving both its customers and its sheet metal workshop. Customers benefit from the ability of the Radesign and Radraft programmes to electronically accept and manipulate their product designs as files, or to create finished designs, drawings and production data from their original concepts or sketches.

Even its bigger customers do not always have their own design facilities. But that is no problem because using their sketches Ripley is able to create finished designs on the Radan system. And because designs can be produced in 3D, it is able to create product drawings that customers can readily visualise.

As Ripley's production engineer, Derek Tomkins, explains `When we produce a design in 3D the customer knows straight away what it will look like and he can then start making his comments. And if, for example, a design for a cabinet has a cover on it, we can show it in 3D on screen with the cover removed.'

With the Radan system Ripley can also help customers make sure they are designing products that can be manufactured. Because of its long experience in making sheet metal parts and complex assemblies customers respect the advice it gives and the effort that goes into getting products right for manufacture.

Their designers even phone us to ask if this or that can be done. It helps their costs if they produce designs that suit our manufacturing capability. Sometimes they will supply sketches or a box of parts from which we can produce the drawings. Once we are satisfied with these they go to the customer for comment.'

For Ripley's own sheet metal shop the benefits of CADCAM come from the ability of the New Radbend, Radpunch and Radprofile software to create the punching and profiling programmes needed to make often quite complex component shapes. There are currently around 8000 component drawings stored on the Radan system.

Ripley is a big user of Pullmax punching machines and in the past eight years it has purchased and replaced a succession of these as the technology has evolved. At the same time it has made sure that its ability to design and draw parts, and to generate the part programmes using CADCAM has kept pace. It was the close working relationship that exists between Pullmax and Radan which first introduced Ripley to Radan and this three-way partnership has continued ever since. For Derek Tomkins, Radan's presence at Pullmax open houses in Basingstoke is still one of the best ways of keeping uptodate.

He recalls the decision to go for the Radan system. `After we'd had a demonstration of the system we did a further investigation of the user market and discovered that Radan was highly respected in its particular field. So we had no hesitation in investing what it then cost to put the Radan system in.' Ripley has further enhanced its CADCAM system as a result of buying a Swiss-built Bystronic laser sheet profiling machine, again from Pullmax UK. With this additional high speed laser profiler to programme the Unix-based operating system on which the Radan design and programming software then ran was getting a bit slow for handling the larger programmes.

We needed to speed it up,' says Tomkins, `and Radan told us that could be achieved by running the programmes on PC hardware. So a few months later we did make the change, at the same time adding the Radprofile software needed to create the programmes for profiling parts on the laser machine.' Aided by Radprofile, the laser machine has opened the way to get shapes produced more quickly than if punches had to be made and tool stations loaded. This has proved particularly useful when making prototype parts. More than once Ripley has been able to supply a finished part within a couple of hours of the customer requesting it, Radprofile played a significant part in this very short delivery time.

So having the Radan 3D design capability enables Ripley to work closely with customers in a way that would not otherwise be possible. Also the change-over to PC hardware now enable the most to be made of Radan's user-friendly CADCAD software. And being able to programme the production of laser-cut parts rapidly enables Ripley to produce and deliver parts on demand.