How many using highfeed?

[Jimmy Wakeford from Barefoot CNC]

Have a competive situation Mastercam verses a software called solidcam(?). The solidcam people are saying that they can reduce the programming time by half(maybe on simple parts?) I've never heard of it and dont know anything about it.

 

The customer is interested in how much time and money that the highfeed option in Mastercam could save them. So I figured I would come to you guys and see if you had any real world experience using highfeed or if anyone has heard of solidcam.

 

Jimmy teh "Solid what?"

[Rekd™]

Isn't that the cam engine for Soiled Works?

[TREV]

jimmy,

i tried it a couple of times and it seemed to make ky cycles longer on poket routines.i have not played with it since.i am running decent machines(makino)with good accel and decel rates and buffer space is of no concern to me,i have plenty. i guess if you had a machine prone to over travel it might help. but maybe im all wet and had some settings wrong i know there were some parameters for controling the "g's" of the machine.

also i did a search for solidcam and one of the pages i got was for cnc machining magazine (haas)

and it had all kinds of screen shots of mc

trevor

[Rekd™]

 

LoL

 

Webby, feel free to nuke the **** out of this post.

 

'Rekd

[Rekd™]

BTW, Jimmy, I've played with it and had mixed results. It's fairly tedius to get set up properly, but once it is, it will likely be very nice.

 

'Rekd

[Jimmy Wakeford from Barefoot CNC]

Rekd I dont know.

 

Trev longer pockets. Great. As far as high feed I have some customers using it mainly during conventional material removal. SLowing down for deeper cuts and speeding up for shallow cuts.

It does help on older machines as far as accel /deccel. But makinos kick butt.

[Gary]

I've used it on pockets with lots of bosses scattered around the bottom. I was getting reductions of anywhere from 40 to 67% based on the number of obstacles to go around. Makes the machine haul !#@ when going around them. It is very impressive for the boss to watch also.

[Mike Mattera - TFM]

Faster is better, but the key to HighFeed (HF) is "Faster when it can, Slower when you have to". Even if HF makes it go slower (and sometimes it does) it's important to point out that going slower will be improving his accuracy and tool life. You cant cut fast with a broken tool.

 

Most times it will knock 15% off the cycle time. But most importantly it provides a more efficent cut. The only other package that does anything like the HF is Vericut and it's not calculating based on Volume, it calculates based on changes of direction. HF does both. BTW Vericut is like 10K.

 

SolidCam is a product from a German based company. I would push the tech support angle also.

 

Hope that helps,

 

Mike Mattera

[M. Anderson]

Jimmy,

 

Yea, what Mike M. said -

 

quote:

---

Faster is better, but the key to HighFeed (HF) is "Faster when it can, Slower when you have to". Even if HF makes it go slower (and sometimes it does) it's important to point out that going slower will be improving his accuracy and tool life. You can’t cut fast with a broken tool.

---

I have just got V9.1 so I don't know if they have changed anything since V8.1.1 as far as the "Highfeed" options.

 

What I can tell you is - I have used it on quite a few jobs in the past - sometimes to speed things up - sometimes to slow things down. I will sometimes use it on both the roughing and the finishing passes – sometimes just on the roughing.

 

It all depends on the job!

 

If it is something I am willing to set and baby-sit - I will crank it way UP! Mainly because I or someone else will be standing by the machine to slow it down if the feed is too excessive.

 

If it is something I am going to run lights-out - I will use highfeed to slow down the feed rates into the corners quite a bit and thru the heavier cuts also, this will sometimes lead to slower cycle times - but as of yet I have not killed a part or broke a cutter doing this! Notice I said -YET!

 

I don't have the cycle times like Ron was talking about the other day - but if it is a 4 to 8 hour cycle time - the highfeed option has given me the ability to run one of the parts lights-out. So not only do I get faster cycle times on some parts - I also get more parts - and more confidence in Mastercam, my machine and even ME.

 

I really do like this feature and do use it quite often when the opportunity arises.

 

Later,

 

Mark Anderson

[M. Anderson]

Oh yea, SolidCam or something like that???

 

I think that was the stuff me and Billy saw at South-Tec???

 

If it was - they were running a pretty canned demo on a part in Solidworks - I tried to get him to show me how all the toolpaths were set up since he was doing somekind of drag and drop type of "Machining Strategy" something or another. But he never would show me how you set up those "Machining Strategies" - kept saying it was more "Machine Dependant" - OK???

 

Anyway - it looked PRETTY - but I did not see how you had much control??

 

Later,

 

Mark Anderson

 

[ 03-30-2004, 08:29 PM: Message edited by: M. Anderson ]

[Jimmy Wakeford from Barefoot CNC]

Another addon we've had alot of success with is cimco's hsm for surface parts. The processing speed is blazingly fast and the customers that are using it are able to run the machines up to 200% faster without the maching "studdering".

 

Maybe a benchmark is in order. Get the part and set up the ops library and go that route.

 

This is great info keep it coming.

[Phil Orenstein]

My .02 expericne on this issue: I've tried using Mastercams HSM button and it worked well but output lots of code, line by line feed changes. Fadal has a great feature called Surface Analyser which processes the posted gcode and sends it to the Fadal in binary. It achieves speeds of up to 400 IPM on strait moves and slows it down to 10 IPM or slower on sharp corner moves. Many new controls have some sort of HSM feature built in - sort of and ACC/DEC feature with look ahead so it slows down ahead of time as its approaching a corner. I know newer Haas has it. But I don't think it can give you the range of sppeds that the add-ons or the MC HS button can give you.

 

Phil

[Fig sign]

Solidcam is ISRAELY company (former Cadtech ).

I was one of the first users of Solidcam (from ver 1 to 2000 ).

My first complex molds I made on Solidcam ver 3.

It is not a Mastercam ,has only 4 axes positioning ,lacks a lot of things ,but it is not a bad product .

I wouldn`t change Mastercam for it ,ever !

When they visit me once a year trying to sell it us ,I know what to ask demonstrate.

Last time the guy tried 20 min to mill 3 d spline without success and ended with surface milling with boundaries .

I still contiinue to use their old Dos product Cadtool/NCtool and I like it .

They do`nt have toolpath filtering ,BTW ,so prepare for a LONG code .

And I doubt their calculation time is faster .

 

Answer to the question :I use HSM very rare .

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

Myself, I personally prefer the options I have in my machine's control that use Acc/Dec and spindle load to determine feeds. It seems to give me the greatest amount of control over the various factors. But they are control OPTIONS meaning you pay extra for them. $6k for AICC and over $11k for HPCC. With High Feed you get it for "free". It's all in what you want...

 

JM2C