It was actually a quiet week. But behind the doors of a virtual conference room, an important vote took place: The Technology Working Group 2025 met to prepare for the upcoming DIN meeting.
Also present: experts from Bechtle, DSC, Hexagon, Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen, Siemens, TDM Systems, ZF – and of course us from CIMSOURCE. Espresso was steaming in the digital coffee cups, terms such as DIN 4000, 4003 and, most importantly for us, Part 103 were flashing on the monitors!
But what exactly was being discussed? And why doesn’t this only affect standards specialists?
🔹DIN 4000/3-1 – Terms and principles: Discussions were held on how definitions for machining processes and cut-off point codes can be merged in a meaningful way. A key suggestion was to reserve the letter “Q” exclusively for feature identifiers in part 103 (recommendations for use) in order to avoid confusion with feature identifiers.
🔹DIN 4000/3-89 – Tool holders and intermediate modules: The planned restructuring of this standard poses challenges: image identifiers and coding for adapters and intermediate modules are to be omitted in future. But does a characteristic attribute list without image identifiers even make sense? It will definitely bring about a significant change for software systems. It is precisely this question that will have to be finally clarified at the upcoming DIN meeting – before the draft standard is adopted.
🔹DIN 4000-103 – Recommendations for the use of cutting tools: This new standard is about to be published. The final changes mainly concern the naming of features. The draft will then be published – an important milestone for the structured recommendation of cutting data.
Also on the agenda next week are parts 95 (cut-off point coding) and 99 (fundamentals of parts lists).
Explosive point of discussion
Guide pins – length or not? One of the most exciting topics of discussion was apparently a detail – with major consequences:
Should a guide pin be counted as part of the overall length of a tool or should it be specified separately? DIN and ISO have different views on this. What do you think? Does the guide pin belong to the overall length or should it be listed as a separate feature?
STEP files and their pitfalls
The quality and structure of the transferred data depends heavily on the software used. How can a uniform data standard for STEP files be defined and secured?
Conclusion
Standards are important The meeting clearly showed that standardization is everything – but not boring. We look forward to next week’s meeting – and even more to your input!
Stay tuned – and standardize with us!
