3D Multizone Scaling Method of an NC Program for Sole Mould Manufacturing

In shoe manufacture, soles are made by injection moulding or foam moulding. When making the moulds for soles, it is necessary to make master models for all soles of every size. The master model of a sole is manufactured by numerically controlled (NC) machining. The present method for making 3D NC part programs for the sole master models is to use a computer-aided design and a computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) system. This is tedious and manpower intensive.

This paper proposes a method for reducing the time and cost for producing the 3D NC part programs of the sole master models. In this method, the NC part programs of the master model for the sample size sole are generated by the CAD/CAM system. Then, depending on the difference in dimensions between the sample size sole and another size sole, the scaling (grading) dimensions (values) in each of 3 axes are used to generate 3D NC part programs for the master model for another size of sole.