Keep what your shop has dialed in
Swarf is a thinking partner for CNC machinists and shops: it reviews drawings and programs, remembers what your shop dials in, and generates G-code for your machines. Here's how it helps you capture tribal knowledge before your senior machinists retire.
It lives in people's heads
The offset that makes the second op hold size. Which vise jaw to use on the thin-wall job. Why you never run that alloy dry. Your best machinists know it because they learned it the hard way, at the machine.
The rest of your machine shop's know-how is in tip sheets that get stale, wikis nobody reads, and setup notes in a file share. When someone retires or moves on, most of it goes with them.
Talk through the job once. Swarf keeps it.
You don't fill in a form. You talk shop with Swarf about a real job, the way you would with an apprentice, and it keeps three kinds of knowledge.
Your equipment
Tell Swarf about the machine, holder, material or chuck you run the job on, and it adds them to your records. Every conversation after that can see them, and pulls up the full specs when the job needs them.
Your rules
Say how your shop does it - "every tapped hole in aluminum gets a Helicoil." Swarf asks before it saves the rule to the job's workspace, then follows it in every conversation in that workspace.
Your documents
Upload the setup sheet, the manual, the marked-up print. Attach it to the machine or job it belongs to, and Swarf reads it when that comes up again.
The next time a job like it comes through, you're not starting from scratch. Ask Swarf, and the answer starts from your machines, your tooling and your rules, not a textbook.
What works today, and what's coming
Today, what you capture lives in your own Swarf account. Your lead machinist can build up your machines, tooling and rules once, and use them job after job.
Shop-wide sharing is on our roadmap, so the operator at the machine can see what the programmer captured.
Start with one job
- Pick a job your best machinist runs well.
- Have them talk it through with Swarf: the machine, the tooling, the setup, what goes wrong.
- Confirm the rules Swarf proposes along the way.
That's one CNC job's worth of knowledge out of someone's head and written down.