Metwest Engineering – Faster Design and Production of Railway Products with IRONCAD

About Metwest Engineering

Metwest Engineering (MWE) is an Australian engineering firm with nearly three decades of experience in infrastructure and rail. The company supplies thousands of products to rail projects across the country, often with very tight deadlines for manufacturing and installation.

The Challenge

Many complex components must be designed, tested, and manufactured quickly without compromising quality or precision. Metwest previously used SolidWorks, Inventor, and AutoCAD, but their limitations made it difficult to maintain speed and flexibility in projects. The team needed a system that could handle large numbers of components, allow for quick changes, generate shop drawings directly from the 3D model, and export production data to DXF.

Why IRONCAD

After careful evaluation, Metwest chose IRONCAD as its primary 3D CAD system. Modeling with predefined shapes and configurations requires virtually no sketching; TriBall makes manipulation easy; and workshop drawings are generated in large quantities directly from the scene.

How Metwest Operates Today

• Components are built and reused from libraries
• Changes are made directly in the model when the design changes
• "What-if" scenarios are analyzed before manufacturing
• Multiple shop drawings can be created from the same 3D model in just a few minutes
• Surfaces and components are exported to DXF so that the production department can work directly with the manufacturing data

The result

Railway products and components are delivered more quickly, with fewer errors in drawings and manufacturing data, and greater flexibility in the design process. Large projects with many components are managed efficiently, and all models and drawings are digitally integrated with production.

IRONCAD s offers many features that have made our company much more productive in design, drafting, and production processes. These include the Triball method of manipulation, modeling with preset shapes and configurations, virtually no sketching required, the ease of producing multiple 3D workshop drawings from the Scene, and exporting faces to DXF, among others.

Sean Brunt, Metwest Engineering