Griffith Rubber Mills

Griffith Rubber Mills of Portland, Oregon, bought its CNC mill only 18 months ago, keeping its tooling work in-house for the first time. According to Kris Beuchamp, SolidCAM helped make starting up with CAM simple.

“The biggest key for us was getting up to speed very quickly and being able to produce tooling right away.” Griffith Rubber had been firmly established using SolidWorks for its CAD system for five years. The company’s new milling capability was adopted in anticipation of a sizable customer order for a special windshield seal. Computer-guided tooling was used to create the molds for the seal’s spliced corners. SolidCAM enabled a SolidWorks user, with no previous CAM programming experience, to become productive immediately. “With SolidCAM, a job that we originally estimated would take about a year, was completed in only 4 months.”

Griffith Rubber Mills, a family-owned business, manufactures a variety of rubber products for agricultural machinery, the lumber industry and large-truck manufacturers. With its headquarters in Portland, Griffith Rubber is a national manufacturer and distributor of custom-made rubber products.

“Basically, the selling point for me was how well SolidCAM integrated with SolidWorks,” explained Beauchamp. “If I go in and start working on a CAM part, if something changes and we need to adjust something in the model itself, I make the change in SolidWorks, and I come back and SolidCAM has updated the CAM. I don’t have to start over, like I would in a CAM system that wasn’t integrated.”