SHAPEMATE™

CAD and Digitized Shape Cutting

SHAPEMATE™ increases profitability and productivity by greatly reducing raw material and labor costs, order-processing time, and errors caused by hand cutting. SHAPEMATE™ provides an easy to use solution for processing ALL of your specialty shape requirements.

In the past processing specialty shapes consisted of nothing more than receiving templates or patterns from the customer and hand-cutting them.  At best the customer sent these templates or patterns on paper, cardboard, plywood or anything that was available.  Cutting these shapes was left up to a specialist in the hand-cutting department.  The task was tedious, trying and sometimes costly. In the meantime, the accuracy and speed provided by your automated glass-cutting machine sat idle.

The SHAPEMATE™ CAD/CAM Module incorporates AutoCADLT®, which is considered by most to be the industry standard for Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) systems.  This easy to use yet powerful CAD system provides your CAD operator with the ability to recreate specialty shapes that have been provided in the form of a dimensional drawing.  When the drawing has been completed a Data Exchange Format (.DXF) file is created for processing.  The .DXF file also expands system versatility by providing the added ability for you to process .DXF files provided by your customers, created on their in-house CAD system.

Once created, a drawing can be stored in the SHAPEMATE™ Library of Shapes for future use.  A report of all shapes is available. Companies using SHAPEMATE™ have created libraries containing thousands of shapes that can be recalled at any time for processing.

The SHAPEMATE™ Digitizing Module provides an easy to use, yet highly accurate solution to process your non-geometrical or free form shape requirements. 

This module was designed to function with a wide range of printers, plotters and digitizing machines to expand on the services you provide your customers.  

PMC has chosen the LASICO Digitizing Instrument as its choice for an effective low cost solution to process free form shapes.  Testing has proven that this device provides both reliability and accuracy.

To process customer orders containing free form shapes, templates or patterns are placed on either a horizontal or vertical flat surface.  Once the digitizing instrument is referenced to a home position, the operator simply selects a straight line or curve function and "plots" the outside perimeter of the shape.  When completed the shape can be saved in the SHAPEMATE™ Library of Shapes for future processing.  Each SHAPEMATE™ shape is named with an 8-character name that can uniquely identify the shape.

SHAPEMATE™ generates Numerical Control (NC) instructions for your glass cutting table. Specialty shapes are optimized with a regular glass schedule, providing better material usage.