It All Starts with a Cobalt Model

Ken Ballard is the Director of Engineering & New Product Development for Precision Concepts Medical Technologies, a design and manufacturing company for medical devices. With operations in Winston-Salem, NC and San Jose, Costa Rica, PC-MT provides rapid prototyping and product development with full FDA-registered manufacturing.

Ballard told us he was first introduced to Vellum 2D around 1990 through a television show called Mac TV. He was impressed with how much easier it was to use than AutoCAD.

With customers that include the largest names in medical devices, Precision Concepts provides design and development services in a coordinated effort with the engineering departments of their client companies. From conceptual design, prototyping and tool fabrication, through manufacturing and clean-room assembly, on to packaging and direct shipping, everything can be done by Precision Concepts keeping delivery times fast and quality high. “But it all starts with a Cobalt model,” says Ballard.

The PC-MT team takes pride in rapid model creation and unique product design and development, knowing that in today’s market this is essential to remain competitive. Ballard uses Cobalt in meetings with his customers as together they come up with concepts for a new product. He tells us:

Our customers use Pro/E and SolidWorks for their CAD/CAE platforms. Most have never seen Cobalt™ or Graphite™ in action. Nonetheless, I always draw a flurry of comments like, ‘Wow, that looks so easy with that software.’ As a long-time user of Ashlar-Vellum products I love to see the eye-popping reaction from people when I show them Cobalt.

PC-MT’s success hinges on tight turnaround times and agile development. Ballard tells us this starts with creating a clean model in Cobalt and then being able to hand it off seamlessly to their SolidWorks engineers to create the tooling for their CNC and EDM machines. Cobalt’s precision geometry is easily brought into MasterCAM as well, using both SAT and STEP formats.

Ballard concludes:

Without Cobalt, we could not respond to the tight customer schedules that we do. We attribute our integration of Cobalt design with our ability to respond quickly and efficiently.

Learn More

See more designs by Ballard among those in these Galleries:

See more of Ballard’s work on the Precision Concepts website.