Regional Manufacturing Magazine For The Northwest (WA, OR, and CA)

www.a2zmetalworker.com

Walla Walla Foundry and Delcam Making Beautiful Art Together Through Innovative Software

Vol. 3, No. 5 Oct/Nov 2013Front Cover Story

A2Z METALWORKER NW • 22 • Oct/Nov 2013 www.facebook.com/a2zmetalworker

Walla Walla Foundry and Delcam Making Beautiful Art Together

Through Innovative Software

Nestled in the middle of Walla Walla farm and wine country is the result of a dream. It came from Mark Anderson, founder of the Walla Wall Foundry (WWF) in Walla Walla, Washington more than 3 decades ago. But let us start from the beginning. Mark grew up in Walla Walla and graduated from Whitman College with a Studio Art Degree. He founded the Walla Walla Foundry in 1980, specifically because he wanted to provide casting services to support both his endeavors and those of his fellow local artists.

During the course of his tenure at Whit-man College, Mark met several artists who needed castings, and this spurred into a new business. Mark spent a summer setting up a small foundry in a garage shop to help his fellow artists. Later, he started a business relationship with an artist/client out of San Fran-cisco and felt strongly that he understood the art of casting enough that he could support this artist with quality castings. Mark found in his new customer key ingredients that the two shared, including a requirement for honesty, high quality, and reasonable pricing. In the early days it was all good old fashion casting, artistic talent and labor, no fancy machines to speak of. Literally, the firm was formed as a result of Mark’s love for casting contemporary fine art.

Mark experienced early success as a result of the company’s great quality of casting, and as luck would have it, word spread and some major artists gave the com-pany its earlier successes.

Today, artists as varied and ac-claimed as Maya Lin, Deborah Butterfield, Dale Chihuly, Jim Dine, Kiki Smith, Matthew Barney, Robert Arneson and others have worked closely with the Walla Walla Foundry. Kiki Smith’s silicon, bronze and forged steel sculptures, or Maya Lin’s reclaimed silver or Deborah Butterfield’s horses wrought

in metal and wood re-quire a flexible and open foundry partner. Walla Walla Foundry is that and a whole lot more.The Walla Walla Foundry, from its inception in 1980, continues to be committed to the tech-nological advancement

of fine art casting. In keeping with this tradition, the company has developed a digital operations department. By combining sophisticated software and equipment, with their expertise in producing contemporary sculpture, they have created a multi-dimensional addition to the services they offer their artist/clients.

Fast forward to Walla Walla Foundry’s next chapter.

In 1999 Dylan Farnum (now President of Walla Walla Foundry) came to Wash-ington to work on a large bronze sculpture for an art-ist friend at the Walla Walla Foundry and spent some quality time with Mark An-derson. Instantly Mark saw the value of Dylan’s east coast expertise and offered him a position with the company. Dylan initially worked in the fabrication and CNC milling

areas and saw some opportunities for expansion and modernization. Dylan was instrumental in taking the CNC department from CNC milling of just castings to full 5 axis machining of detailed art pieces

complete (finished work) from bil-let and from raw wood and green log milling.

Dylan remembers the days before Delcam’s PowerMill software.

“PowerMill changed everything”, said Dylan, “All the old software we were using couldn’t even read the STLs we were utilizing (STL- Stereo Lithography is a file format native to the stereo lithography CAD software created by 3D Sys-tems also known as Standard Tessel-lation Language.) “What we were using was probably more suited to

A2Z METALWORKER NW • 23 • Oct/Nov 2013www.facebook.com/a2zmetalworker

cutouts on cabinets, not 3D machining” continued Dylan, “Delcam’s software allowed us to use scanned data and to drive tool paths directly to the machines. It’s so highly intuitive and allows us to do complex geometrical patterns. Delcam’s PowerMill opened up a whole new world for us. As a result of using this super high-end software we were faster and better at what we were doing. We ended up buying 2 new 5 axis machines to expand our milling capabilities.”

Mark’s vision of doing anything an artist/customer wants is always collaborated with Dylan, and Dylan makes it happen with 21st century modern tools. He will search the world and ask the right questions to come up with answers to Marks goals for the company. Dylan says that a pivotal moment in their decision for a software supplier came when a valued customer told Dylan, “If you don’t get Delcam software you will be lost! Pure and simple!”

So on the advice of a client, Walla Walla looked into Delcam software and has not looked back. Dylan said, “When we started using the Del-cam software for the first time, in comparison with the old software we were using, it was like a big light going on. No one here is set in their way of doing things they are all very open minded, so, when management took a good look at Delcam software PowerMILL we were all blown away! It was like, where have we been and why haven’t we been using this software long before now?”

Comments from the Walla Walla Foundry Engineering Department: Aaron Hamilton in the WWF engineering department started using Delcam software about a year ago and says he loves it. “Jon Marc taught me to use it and I prefer it over any other software I have ever used. The menus are laid out better, it’s easier to work through problem areas on a model, it’s more visual to me and the help menu is absolutely great! I can also modify any tool path on the fly and that puts me in control when I need to be in control. Set up is really a breeze with PowerMILL. We run a lot of custom tools and this software allows us to measure it on screen and it’s the exact same out on the machine. It just really works well for us.” Aaron said.

Jon Marc Kortsh, Engineering Man-ager said, “When you are working with art or someone else’s art and you are in charge of replicating it exactly as the artist intended, it is so important to be able to modify a nuance you perceive or that the artist perceives as important.

We work with models and we feel guaranteed of zero collisions with PowerMILL. We have the collision avoidance to where we can go home and run lights out and not fear of coming back to work in the morn-ing to find a big mess. If the PowerMILL software said it would run without a collision it ran perfectly and has never had a crash or colli-sion. We have the utmost faith in Delcam software.”

In the industry Walla Walla Foundry is in there are no re-runs the part is an original Jon ex-plains, “With what we do, almost every single part has never been run before and generally we run one par t. So we almost never have the opportunity to re-run parts so all of our time is spent trying to program perfection in the manufacturing pro-cess. It cannot crash. Just one crash could mean many thou-sands of lost dollars. We work almost ex-clusively with STL’s and PowerMILL is just fine with STL’s as long as we are using the r ight approach. Pow-erMILL doesn’t need surfaces and datum points and this allows faster programming of complex pa r t s and more efficient faster machining. Also, the post pro-cessor support we

get from Delcam is phenomenal and it allows us to continue to run many different machines. Delcam’s Technical representative Randy Twiddy, Senior Applications Engineer out of Windsor On-tario, has been so great to work with and such a great resource for us. If we need a post processor we get it really fast.”

The Walla Walla Foundry continues to grow with advanced thinking and great tools like Delcam software and 5-axis ma-chining, completely supporting their artist partners throughout the world.

For more information on Walla Walla Foundry call: 509-522-2114, or go to their website at: www.wallawal-

lafoundry.com

For more information on Delcam’s software, PowerMILL call: 1-877-DELCAM 1 (335-2261), www.PowerMill.com