CAM innovation is driven by Cadspec at GBS

Great British Sports Cars Ltd (GBS) is a niche sports car manufacturer located in Ollerton near Nottingham that designs and full manufactures lightweight sports cars in the UK. To enhance its manufacturing capabilities, the company has recently invested in Autodesk software platforms via Cadspec. MTD went along to Nottingham to find out more

Richard Hall, Managing Director Great British Sports Cars says: “We have taken a different model from our competitors where we wanted to design, manufacture and build the entire car in-house. This gives us a lot more flexibility on the design and performance, which we can then pass on to the customer.”

When discussing Cadspec and Autodesk Richard continued, “The journey has been really good from the initial meeting at a tradeshow, which we then followed up with a visit to the Autodesk technology centre in Birmingham, which was a really impressive place. We then got put in touch with Cadspec and they held our hand throughout the process, through training and getting the posts written for our Bridgeport machine and then on to producing parts.”

Looking at the software from a shop-floor perspective, Thomas Slaney, CNC Production Engineer at Great British Sports Cars says: “We enjoy using Featurecam, the cycle times have reduced by about a third also the programming time has decreased by around the same. Furthermore, the machine seems to run with much smoother tool paths than before and overall, it seems a much different experience to what we had before.”

“With one particular component, we use a data file to program it and this picks out the slots, threaded holes and the chamfers to help reduce the programming time. We are in the early stages of using Featurecam at the moment, but as we move forward, we will be introducing more new parts, we’re going to be trying to improve cycle times and surface finishes and it will be part of a continuous improvement process.”