Tablet press toolingTablet punches and dies, upper, lower and die
Chung Hsing Pharmaceutical Tooling
The shape of a tablet is decided by one set of upper punch, lower punch and die. What that set looks like is written in the specification the drug maker sends, and no two of them are written the same way.
A specification is not a drawing
What the drug maker sends is a tablet specification: diameter, thickness, tablet weight, cup radius, the engraving and its typeface, the bevel angle, and the position and depth of the score line. Those parameters have to be understood before they can become machining drawings for the upper punch, lower punch and die. The trouble is that there is no standard format, some arrive as TSM or EU standard drawings, some as spreadsheets, some as scanned faxes. An engineer copied them across item by item, close to an hour for one tool set, and a slightly wrong letter spacing or cup radius makes the pressed face unacceptable.
Let the specification become the shop drawing
With CADASU, specifications in any format are parsed into the same set of fields, dressed in the shop's title block and numbering rules, and output as machining drawings for the punches and die. Imperial units are converted automatically, and the engraving, including typeface and depth, is carried into the notes. The engineer's job becomes checking, with every field showing which part of the specification it came from.
A tool set drawn in ten minutes
Preparing the drawings for one tool set fell from about an hour to 14 minutes, and specification errors from transcription dropped by close to ninety per cent. The ability to take rush work changed with it: a last-minute tablet shape change used to take two days to turn around, and now the drawings come back the same day.
“With tablets there is no ‘close enough’. Miss one decimal point and the batch cannot ship.”
Chung Hsing Tooling
Now try it yourself
Adopt it now under the government grant: the cost is covered in full, and you receive a further US$3,700 once approved.