Smartcam may be dead, but it's ghost is sure hard to kill. Yesterday the shop foreman tells me that he needs some engraving work done on two cavities, two cores and seven core pins. Both cavities get the same text. The cores share the same text as well except on one the text must be rotated 180 degrees. The core pins are to be numbered 1 - 7. All the text is to be cut mirrored so the plasitc parts have readable text. No big deal. A half hour or so into the job he decides that he wants three more pins number 8 - 10. That too is no big deal for Smartcam. He also wants everything done as subprograms so the operator can step down the engraving tool as needed. Another simple request. To finish it off, all I have to work with is a blueprint with the text penciled in and highlighted. He wants to know if he needs to get a designer to make a cad file with some text in it. I tell him that it's no big deal to create the text as I go and mirror it. Total time into the job is about 2-1/2 hours including meeting time.
Today is panic time at the zoo. I programmed the text to be .100 high as noted on the marked up print. The customer wants .080 instead. No big deal because I can scale it down. The I find out the foreman gave me partially incorrect information. He wrote down that the pins should be numbered 1-10. In reality they should have been done as 01-10 with a 0 in front of each single digit. So I shift over all the numbers between 1 and 9 and tack in a 0. Panic is running high but I tell everybody to go back downstairs because it's really no big deal. At this point I am still running without any hard cad data but did fix the job in under 45 minutes, subprograms included. The foreman is happy, the boss is happy, the customer is happy. Crazy Cheesehead gets raise. It was at this point that I concluded that even if the company wants to switch over to UG, they will still need Smartcam for quite a few more years. I can easily picture Smartcam users keeping the program on standby for the really fast jobs or the jobs that would be too time consuming on a system that requires cad data of some sort. I know where I work, Smartcam and to a much lesser degree Camax will remain installed on the programming computers. With hard drive capacity always growing by giant jumps, space for Smartcam is not an issue. Jeff Guse ====================================================================== To find out more about this mailing list including how to unsubscribe, send the message "info mfg-smartcam" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ======================================================================
