How much time spent in CAM vs. CAD side of X

[Chris Rizzo]

Pretty simple:

[HevyMetl]

I do all of my design work in Proe. I generally only use cad for machining features, ie. boundaries, fill surfaces, engraving...ect.

[Guest]

I voted 75/25, all of mu desgining and drawing is done in SW but techinally curves boundaries and such are still CAD functions. Thus the 25% in reality it's probably closer to 10-15%

[RandyN]

It must be nice to be able to do all your design work etc in something like Pro or Solidworks. I know how to use both, but neither is up to designing tools around customer data that comes in from every system known to mankind, in iges half the time, and native, Catia, UG, etc. the rest of the time.

 

We do prototype formed parts, deep draws, etc. from part to print in 10 days or less, and I have found nothing better than Mastercam to design the tools in, so we can design and hit the cnc machines in a day or two. Between wireframe, and moldplus for runoff, etc. it has all the tools we need.

[Saultspics]

+1 John and Hevymetl

 

Most of our parts come from Pro-E and AutoCad. We draw our fixtures with MC and some simple parts in the shop.

[Guest]

I do all of my fixtures and tooling all in SW. When I import I import the complete setup.

 

Solidworks will pull I "think" all of the file formats mentioned above.

 

I can not imagine using MC to design anything any longer. As good as it's gotten and it has improved greatly it is still a weaker cousinn compared to other parametric design packagaes.

[LaszloK]

Yes it is a weaker cousin, but a whole lot cheaper and since I send all of my stuff to my CAM guy for programming it eliminates the translation. He then also has the solid history tree to manipulate if necessary.

[Exodus]

I design solidworks, manufacture in MC.

 

I tried making a simple thing in mastercam the other day, and it stopped making sense to me. It's much easier to use s/w

 

MABYE THEY'LL INTEGRATE

[Matt Berube at Ferron Mold]

I doubt it will ever happen but I think it would be awesome if they threw out the solids package and replaced it with the Solidworks package. Complete integration. I'm not even a Solidworks user but the number of people that are must mean something. I wonder how big of a piece of the pie the SW company would want ?