We are moving to Mastercam. I've been a die-hard SC guy since Version 3 and there's some good things and some bad. Sometimes it seems I'm moving backwards and sometimes forwards. We must keep SC around for the revisions or reposts to other machines and we still use it for our punch and lathe but new mill stuff is done in Mastercam.
I must admit that I've only been using Mastercam off and on for a month or so and I'm getting to know where things are, I don't have to search too much to get things done. I'm mostly impressed with the update policy, no maintanance fees just pay for the next version if you want to. You can skip a version or two if there's nothing in it for you. Next is the associativity and storing the machining parameters, mostly helps with surfaces, you don't have to remember what the step-over and tolerance settings were when you created the toolpath. Somethings SUCK. File management is a big suck, there's no history of the last few files, posting doesn't default to the filename, you can name a group of operations and have it output that as the filename, and you can have multiple groups in one file, but the last few files really sucks. The post is much harder to learn than SC, seems like a lot of stuff to wade through to get what you want... Still have a lot to learn about the posts. Still learning, Jeff Brower -----Original Message----- From: Kevin Clark [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, June 23, 2003 10:30 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [mfg-smartcam] CAM Packages I know there has probably been a lot of discussion on this. I have been trying to convince my supervisor to keep smart cam as our main stay. He's one who thinks there are better CAM packages that can be faster and more accurate in the generation of the code for our machines. Since all our machines are vintage 80's and a lot require special mods to the template file to put out the correct clearance for our particular fixtures and we do nothing really fancy (no wrapped geometry). I would just assume stay with SC. But we have vendors calling. Some we will have contact with will be Esprit, Unigrafics, Pro E, EdgeCam and Catia. So far we have had a rep from Esprit show his wares. I was impressed with some features, but wasn't impressed with having to modify the post processors using VB. So, if I may ask, which have any of you used and how do you like them compared to SC? No Vendor please! Thanks, Kevin Clark Programmer Abbott Workholding Inc. ====================================================================== To find out more about this mailing list including how to unsubscribe, send the message "info mfg-smartcam" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ====================================================================== ====================================================================== To find out more about this mailing list including how to unsubscribe, send the message "info mfg-smartcam" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ======================================================================
