We are on our 2nd year with Creo. We are getting better with the software in most respects but we are almost at a stand still with designing dies in the Pro Mold software extension.
Today we went back through the training material found in Precision LMS, and it doesn't cover what we need to do in a typical die design. We don't know whether this means that Pro Mold is not very capable of doing the type of work we need to do or if we just need the right training to get the ball rolling.
We have challenges of complexity that seem to baffle Pro Mold. We have dies that have progressive and multiple impressions. There are staggered depths leading off the die face into the impressions. Many times there are flipped impressions which require a lock depth transition. Each impression typically has a varied lock depth. We need to use our flash, gutter and finish impression that are in our die with a seperate trim operation that includes multiple dies.
We do know that Pro Mold is quite backwards compared to what we've seen in ZW CAD.
1) Each Creo die file generates numerous other files which means more things to retain and not accidentally seperate from the main die file.
2) The rules with Creo's solids creation sets up a lot of obstacles on the way to results. Pro Mold tries to hide the trouble incurred with splitting the one solid in 2 halves. In what I've seen it isn't possible to split up something that was brought in as a solid. I would like to be able to pare down this solid before hollowing this impression out of the die.
3) Once the impression has been hollowed out and the dies are split any remaining work needed done to the die has to be done to both die halves.
4) If you have depth with the quilt that splits the dies you can only split one half at a time. Our dies include flash depth and gutter so we can't save both halves with one split operation.
In what we've seen it appears that Pro Mold doesn't offer us anything but the ability to save a shrink feature in the feature tree. This is an awfully expensive option package for just adding shrink.
I'm saying what we've run into at this point. Perhaps we just haven't got the advanced training necessary to see the beauty of the Pro Mold package. Perhaps we could get better results if we opted to purchase another extension such as Advanced Assembly instead of Pro Mold. (Advanced Assembly includes the same shrink feature option).
Our line of work is with Closed Impression Forging Dies.
Does anyone out there know a training source that would be excellent with Pro Mold?
Based off what our issues are would anyone know how to get around these issues, perhaps with a different methodology?
Would it help if we switched from ProMold to Advanced Assembly.
I will attach an example that shows the challenges that we face in a typical die.
