Alcon Components leverage a CAD/CAM partnership
Thursday, July 28, 2011Alcon Components Ltd have designed and manufactured advanced brake and clutch products since first supplying brakes for Audi Sport’s Group B Quattro rally cars in 1984. Now, Alcon has a worldwide reputation in the motorsport industry, supplying brake components for the World Rally Championship and, in the US, for NASCAR teams. Additionally, the company supplies braking equipment for high performance road cars and for special vehicles used in defence applications.
Alcon’s customers
require the very highest precision and machining quality, combined with
manufacturing flexibility and short lead times. The company’s ability to
satisfy these requirements is key to its success and comes from maintaining
maximum control over quality and scheduling. It does this by keeping many of
the production functions under one roof, enabled by the ability to machine,
assemble and test components in-house. This is facilitated by their current
CAD/CAM setup, partnering SolidWorks with SolidCAM.
SolidWork’s ability to easily import the different CAD formats supplied by customers allows close collaboration with customers, developing their ideas to create a bespoke manufacturing process and finished product. With weight a permanent concern in motorsport, Alcon are permanently investigating ways of reducing weight while maintaining stability. SolidWork’s support for integrated analysis and simulation tools are ideal for this task.
The strong partnership between SolidWorks and SolidCAM and the seamless integration it provides has allowed Alcon to get error-free design data from more complex shapes into CAM in a short amount of time. They continue to keep ahead of the competition with every version release.