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As I write this article, I’m drinking water out of a glass mason jar. The jar has a threaded top with a flared lip below it, as well as raised numbers and lettering along each of its four rounded sides, plus some ornamental dots and ridges. Each of these features required someone to mill them into the mold that produced this jar I misuse as a drinking glass because my children have moved on from sippy cups and decimated the contents of my cabinet.

For Omega Enterprises — an Indiana tool-and-die shop specializing in repairing and reproducing molds for glass bottles — features such as these are an important part of its business. However, reverse engineering mold components is difficult work requiring careful measurements and skilled moldmakers. With the workforce being what it is, the company needed to keep its most skilled workers on profitable tasks, but the time it took to match the features to the tool path was keeping employees stuck in an engineering quagmire. To overcome this challenge, the company turned to digital twin and scanning technology from Hexagon.

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Mold Repair and Glass Bottlenecks

Omega Enterprises began in 1993 in Winchester, Indiana. The company manufactures and repairs molds for the glass bottle industry, often having to reproduce complex artistic patterns for their customers. For a long time, reproducing these forms required tracing the parts with a touch probe in an older milling machine, a slow process for any bottle design. “A lot of what we do today is build and repair, or revisions,” says James Jarrett, president of Omega Enterprises. “When we have a job, we have to replicate whatever intricate glass design may be on those bottles.”

Even after nailing down the surface details, determining the approach to repairing the mold could be difficult. “We were constantly faced with altering molds and blanks with multiple compound angles that would require blending,” Jarrett says. This included molds that customers had altered by hand, requiring Omega to repair those features by hand as well. “It was challenging to try and reverse engineer exactly what had been done by hand. It was a lot of math combined with guesswork,” he continues.

The length of this process created a production bottleneck that drained time from valuable employees the company would prefer move on to higher-value work. “The biggest challenge we face, especially as a small business, is the labor shortage in manufacturing today,” Jarrett says. “We used to have 60 employees a decade ago, and now we’re down to 15, and we’ve lost a lot of skills those retired employees used to have.” Those skilled employees left have a lot of products on their plates, so any time saved is vital for the company. 

The company searched for a way to speed the process of reverse-engineering and repairing molds, and it found the solution in digital twin technology.

First Pass Scanning Glass

While Omega Enterprises had already been using EdgeCAM for its machining processes, the company updated to the latest version to take advantage of its ability to build digital twin models from CAD and 3D scan data. “EdgeCAM allows operators to build a model from CAD or from 3D scan data and maintain the integrity of the design,” says Chris Delwiche, manager at Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence. “It uses automatic feature recognition to interrogate the model geometry and identify machinable features.”

Using a PrimeScan 3D scanner — also from Hexagon — Omega Enterprises could quickly create a 3D model of the bottle features without the time-consuming manual process they had relied on earlier. Instead, the user simply points the scanner at a bottle and scans its vital features in a matter of minutes. The scanner generates a 3D replica and sends the STL file directly to EdgeCAM, where the user can get to work on tool paths. “Now that we can create a 3D scan using our PrimeScan scanner, the digital twin gives us an idea of exactly how the original mold was made,” Jarrett says. “We can easily adjust, measure, add overlays and even build new models.”

The accuracy of the digital twin and the ease of making adjustments are both valuable to the work of replicating mold designs. The company has to take into account many factors: ensuring the bottle holds the exact advertised volume of liquid, replicating the glass weight, avoiding sharp edges and replicating artistic decorations, among other things. “The digital twin helps us, as we can program a model and then take a 3D scan of the actual bottle and overlay that to make sure our model is a good match,” Jarrett continues. “We don’t need to guess anymore. It’s a huge advantage for what we do. We can even share the new models we make with customers.”

Additionally, the integration with EdgeCAM makes programming tool paths much easier, according to Jarrett. “Having the ability to produce a
super clean, high-quality 3D scan ensures we generate clean G code for our tool paths,” he explains. “EdgeCAM Strategy Manager provides machining strategies tailored to the manufacturer’s preferences and best practices,” Delwiche says. “It can create rules governing how a part will be
machined and reduce programming time.”

The digital twin produced by the 3D scanner also enables the shop’s programmers to work from home. “Ever since COVID, more and more people want to work remotely,” Jarret says. “We have two programmers and both of them work remotely — they aren’t located near our facilities at all. It’s hard to find a talented programmer, and technology like EdgeCAM makes it possible for our programmers to work remotely.” When questions arise, someone at the company’s main facility can scan the part and send a copy of the digital twin to the programmer so everyone knows exactly what the part looks like. Conversations about spacing between features, for example, are greatly improved when using an accurate 3D scan. This creates a foundation for clear communication, even across language barriers. “One of our programmers is based in Columbia,” Jarret says, “so the digital twin even helps with the language barrier. It's easier to explain things when we can quickly spin up a replica of the physical part using our 3D scanner.”

Digital Twins and Labor Wins

The scanner also reduced the time it took to move to the machining phase. Delwiche points to this as a major benefit for digital twins and 3D scanning. “The biggest value is to supplement the workforce,” he says. With fewer people entering the manufacturing labor force and many skilled workers retiring, knowledge is being lost. “The legacy knowledge isn’t there with newer hires, and there isn’t as much time to train people,” he continues, “so the more we can create technology that does the lion's share of the programming itself, or predicts the best way to run based on past use cases, the better.”

Jarrett agrees. “Given how hard it is to compete in manufacturing today, the only way to succeed is to take advantage of the technology we have in the States,” he says. “We need to rely on automation and the machines themselves being more intelligent.” In this case, using the 3D scanner and EdgeCAM halved the time it took to produce a finished mold. “Take a basket weave part,” Jarrett says. “It took 40 hours to duplicate the part in our previous process. Now we are able to do all that and cut parts within half that time.” That frees up a lot of time for valuable employees to move on to other projects. “We can get more control and be more precise, but most importantly, it saves us time and frees up our staff for other critical tasks.”