The process of the present invention relates to the manufacture of personalized items such as jewelry. More particularly, the process of the present invention relates to an automated system that receives custom orders for personalized rings (i.e., class, championship, and affiliation) and generates the machining instructions that enable a milling machine to create the personalized ring from a wax blank.
Class rings have been a popular keepsake among students for generations. Originally, they were relatively uniform and provided students little opportunity to express themselves. Over time, automated manufacturing processes made it possible to provide students customizing choices. Modern students are driving the class ring market toward a level of customization that has been previously economically impractical using present manufacturing methods.
Present manufacturing methods include the use of computer aided design/computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM). CAD/CAM has facilitated producing customized rings in large quantities. The present level of customization provides personalized features such as: student's name, school name, graduation year, icons, academic degrees, and the like.
Traditionally, the use of CAD/CAM in the jewelry industry has been primarily focused on the manufacture of custom molds and engraving or otherwise machining the jewelry directly. These two approaches have limitations. Machining molds using CAD/CAM is too expensive for single-use custom applications. Engraving jewelry is also expensive due to the precious metal lost to scrap, manufacturing errors and ordering errors.
CAD/CAM technology is also difficult to automate for the purpose of making personalized products. In one legacy system, a CAD/CAM operator manually manipulates a geometric model of a ring by grabbing a surface on the blank geometric model, defining the boundary splines, projecting the text or graphic onto the surface and then instructing the CAD/CAM software to generate machining instructions for the geometric model that has been created. The machining instructions result in a desired toolpath for a computer numerically controlled (“CNC”) milling machine. Using human operators to repeat these steps manually in order to generate the machining instructions for thousands of individual, personalized rings is cost prohibitive.