VUE 2026: Stoneswood Shows Vericut Is More Than Collision Checking

The Vericut Users' Exchange (VUE) took place in the UK in September 2026, drawing around 60 attendees to the Silverstone Museum, adjacent to the Silverstone Formula 1 Circuit.

The day's central message was straightforward: for CNC machine shops, Vericut simulation extends well beyond identifying potential collisions. That argument was made most forcefully by Tom Whitbread, Technical Engineer at Stoneswood Precision Components, a Cheshire-based firm and part of Hyde Aero Products.

"We want to show how we're using Vericut for more than simply checking whether a toolpath is going to collide."

Setup sheets as simulation input

Stoneswood's approach starts with documentation discipline. Its Vericut sessions are built using the same documentation issued to shop-floor operators, meaning the simulation checks the setup, not just the NC code. If the programmed session and the operator's paperwork disagree, the discrepancy gets caught before the job reaches the machine.

The company also feeds Vericut's cycle-time estimates back into production planning, using simulated manufacturing time to inform scheduling and tooling decisions. And it uses Icam to develop bespoke post-processing functionality for its machine tools — in one case, controlling table rotations to machine a component approximately 2.3 m long within a working envelope of around 1.6 m.

Turning on a machining centre

The headline example was interpolation turning on the company's DMGMORI machining centres, which enables the production of turned features through coordinated machine movement rather than a separate turning operation. The harder problem was not the machine function itself but fitting it into Stoneswood's controlled digital workflow.

"It's one thing to know that the machine can perform a particular function. It's another to make sure we can program it, post-process it and independently verify what the machine's going to do before we press start."

Stoneswood used hyperMILL's general turning functionality to create the toolpaths, then developed bespoke post-processing logic in Icam around DMGMORI's CYCLE806 functionality, and built a Vericut environment capable of interpreting and reproducing the process digitally.

"That's the real outcome for us. We haven't just made interpolation turning possible on the machine; we've brought it into a process where we can understand and prove the behaviour before manufacturing begins."

What else was on the agenda

Gavin Powell, Managing Director of Vericut UK, welcomed attendees before Gavin Bridger, Applications Engineering Manager, opened the technical programme. Jonathan Hollinworth, Area Sales Manager for Northern England and Scotland, reported that Vericut 9.7 delivers performance improvements of 10-40%.

Vericut, part of CGTech, established in 1988, specialises in NC/CNC simulation, verification, optimisation, post-processing, and analysis software, used by companies of different sizes in all industries. For more information, call +44 (0)1273 773538.

M4S Take:: The Stoneswood workflow is the genuinely grounded story here — setup-sheet verification and digital proof of interpolation turning are concrete, checkable practices. The claim worth scrutinising is the "performance improvements of 10-40%" for Vericut 9.7: that's a wide range with no benchmark, no machine configuration, and no test methodology attached. A 10% gain and a 40% gain are very different purchasing arguments, and the source doesn't say which workloads sit at which end. Ask for the test data before budgeting around the top of that range.