MachineSMMC, I have been using Mastercam since 1989 (v3) to machine injection molds and electrodes (I also do some other sruff now that I'm self employed). Every version of MC gets better. I have demo'd MoldPlus in the past, but never worked for anyone willing to purchse it and my own pocket aren't that deep right now. With MC Solids, I can break out electrodes from a core or cavity quickly, position them, machine them. My clients use mostly graphite, but a couple use Telco copper. As to finishes, it is a matter of selecting the parameters in MC and how much time you can devote to having the piece on the machine. Get MC. I have use Pro Machinist, Surfcam, Smartcam, Bobcad, and Cimatron. For the money, MC can't be beat.

[ 03-07-2003, 12:49 PM: Message edited by: Jerry Bichsel ]

I remember getting a demo from the Anilam dealer in Dallas in 1987, I believe, on their Anicam product. It was Mastercam v2.? with the Anilam front end.

Sarted out in 1990, v3

Yep. As long as the solids are connected/touching, "Solids", "Boolean", "Add", follow the prompts.

Mark, Jack; If the U.S. is such a horrific place that does nothing but bully every other country, force our way of life on others, steal other countries riches, why do you stay? When will you be moving to one of those other "nirvana" places? If I were so disgruntled as you seem to be with this country, I would move elsewhere. Maybe China, North Korea, Iraq, Venezuela or Sudan would be more comforting. From the sounds of it you are both fairing well under the evil oppression of the U.S. capitalistic monster. As to whether I am better off than 2, 4, 6 or 8 years ago; YES. Bigger house, truck paid off, making more money, spending more time with my wife and kids, skiing almost every weekend. True, the U.S. is not perfect. But I'll take it over any other place on this planet. As to Iraq's direct threat to the U.S., true, they have nothing that can reach us directly, nut how long until they sell something to some terrorist that can be carried in a pen, cell phone, briefcase, etc., that get carried into a U.S. subway. But I'm sure then all the blame will go on Bush for not having taken Saddam out when he had the chance. Don't forget that Clinton had OSB offered to him in chains for (4) times.

Jack, You throw out some interesting items regarding an Iraqi woman with a gun over her head vowing to fight for her country. Ever met an Iraqi that lived under Saddam and now lives here? Ever talked with anyone about how people in Iraq are FORCED AT GUNPOINT to show "loyalty"? Ever had an Iraqi tell you how family members are tortured and killed if you don't march in the "patriotic rally"? How school children are beaten if the don't shout loud enough in support of Saddam? Just because we are free to voice our opinions, pro or con, does not mean everyone everywhere enjoys the same liberty.

I just couldn't stay silent on this one. Having served as a tank gunner and commander from 1980-1986 in Korea, Germany and Ft. Hood, Texas, I have a bit of insight. There is a lot that goes on in the Korean penninsula that NEVER gets reported here. Remember the assassination squad sent from N. Korea into S. Korea to kill the S. Korean president in '83? I have watched the N. Korean force across the Im Jin River. I also had a friend that was more like a brother to me that was killed in the Gulf War in '91. One of the unfortunate few. SFC Harold P. Witzke III. For those who think we are rushing in without "crossing the t's and dotting the i's", just look at what information is coming to light. Whose word do you take, our governments or Iraq's which has been proven to be lying over and over again. What about the U.N. inspectors report from 1998 that listed 19,500 tons of VX nerve agent and the December 2002 Iraq declaration that "reports" 13,000 tons destryed. What about the other 6,500 tons (13,000,000 pounds)? What about a regime that has had four plus years WITHOUT inspectors to hide and develope further nasty secrets? All this "smoking gun" talk is idiocy. For those of you not familiar with firearms, a gun does not smoke until AFTER it has been fired. Then it could be too late for whoever is on the receiving end. I do not advocate nuking the entire country unless we are attacked in that manner or have irrefutable evidence that we would be nuked, biologically or chemically attacked. I do not believe that our government is perfect but I do believe it is by far the best and most benevolent on the planet. And for those in other countries that don't believe so, check your own government's coffers. Look at the deposits made by America. Check out our foreign aid totals. God bless our armed services and damn the liberals who stand in our way.

The "Import" in Job Setup allows you to import, tools, material data, toolpaths that have been defined/saved with another Mastercam file. So if you had a workpiece that you needed to program that was nearly identical to one you worked on last week/month, you can import all that information from the older file and not have to define it from scratch. Hope this helps.

I would just like to respond to Bryan Davis on a couple of points: 1. You are complaining about MasteCAM Solids and the fact that some of MasterCAM's CAD functions are behind other CAD vendors products. Stop and read the name of the product - MasterCAM not MasterCAD. The emphasis is and should be CAM. 2. Having used MaseterCAM and Cadkey since 1989 and suffered through Cadkey for Windows, CK97, CK98 and CK99, I am confused as to how you could recommend that product line with their history (since Baystate) of lack of developement of FastSurf FastSolids or CKSolids, excessive delays of promised releases, lack of any real support in the form of updates/patches, lost data, locked files, "bad collective" messages and promises of "wait for the next release", etc. etc. I jumped ship in '97 and went with SolidWorks and have enjoyed designing again. 3. Cadkey's user forum is highly restrictive in what can and cannot be said about the product and service thereof. I have been kicked off their forum twice for being critical of the product and their support staff, no more critical than you have been of Mastercam, yet Cadkey will not accept criticism of their product nor staff. 4. I do not 'play' with MasterCAM. I use it for injection mold programming, 4 and 5-axis work. I do not expect it to be the perfect CAD package as that is not it's intent. CAM is CAM, CAD is CAD. If you expect MasterCAM to be the be-all, end-all of CAD, you have misunderstood what each means. If you expect Cadkey's Keymill to reach anywhere near MasterCAM's ability, dream on. And remember, MasterCAM Solids is a relatively new feature. It has only been with us for a couple of years and gets better with each update/release. By the way, how many new releases/updates does Cadkey promise? How many do they actually deliver? How many do they deliver when promised? I rest my case.

I worked for a thermoforming company for about eight months of 2000 and 2001. When I started, they were using Surfcam 99. When I left they were using Mastercam v8. They had Mastercam v6 for the mold shop work on the Fadal's but used Surfcam for the 5-axis stuff. Once I showed them what MC 8 was about, they had no problem upgrading. I will say that the Surfcam 5-axis post for the Motionmasters was MUCH easier to work with than Mastercam's, but the bugs got worked out. [Webmaster - Comments related to a reseller were removed to the keep message in-line with Forum Guidelines. 5-Axis Mastercam post was obtained through MLC MLC CAD Systems in Texas.] [ 05-15-2002, 03:55 PM: Message edited by: Webmaster ]

JAMMAN, Trust me, in Montana there is a saying; "The snow never melts, the wind just blows it back and forth until it wears out". I just love winter. I always get bummed out when I have to put my skis away each spring. My wife is still trying to adjust to waking up and seeing ice on my mustache since I sleep with the windows open. Eighteen years, you think she'd know by now. As to the sheep that are nervous being male or female.....yes. It's and old joke that I grew up with since we raised sheep when I was a kid. Dumbest animals on earth.

Not meaning to offend the CA residents, I have family in CA) but I'm sure glad I don't live there. Working from home, I get a view through the Ponderosa pines at Pikes Peak, get my kids up, ready and off to school each morning, walk into the other room and kiss my wife as she works (GE promotes working from home), pay $0.20-$0.30 less per gallon of gas, watch fox, squirrel and deer in the yard. Plus, I love snow! Originally from Montana. Yeah, I know, "where the men are men, the women are too and the sheep are nervous".

That reminds me.... Way back in '96 I had the opportunity to benchmark MC on single and dual processor PC's. Both were Dell Pentium Pro 200Mhz, Win NT, setup identically except one had dual procs. When performing the exact same operations in MC, the dual was typically 15% faster than the single. The other advantage is that if you have some huge program in MC that is going to crunch for a while, one proc can do that while the other handles other functions, i.e. Word, Excel, SW, etc. with little if any hit on performance.

Bullines, I'm not meaning to be argumentative, just trying to assist kwolf in setting up a system that will be as trouble free running the apps he listed as possible. Beings that you can get refurbished Oxygen boards direct from 3DLabs, you can save some $$. Oxygen VX1, AGP4, 32MB $99.00 Oxygen GVX1, AGP 32MB VGA MDR20 Stereo $249.00 Not much of a difference in $$ from Geforce3 that range from $109-$199 on Pricewatch.com. Or you can get an Oxygen GVX1 Pro, AGP 64MB VGA DVI-I Stereo $425.00 If you have an existing Oxygen card, you can also do a 'trade-up' and save some $$. [ 04-22-2002, 10:08 AM: Message edited by: Jerry Bichsel ]

Bullines, Ok, but there are major differences between the ways that Quake, etc. utilize the card/resources and how CAD/CAM does. Check this out: http://www.solidworks.com/swdocs/support/h...s/videotest.cfm Pick a vendor and check out the limitations and which passed/failed. Also check out the reports on the Nvidia chips. [ 04-21-2002, 12:25 PM: Message edited by: Jerry Bichsel ]

JAMMAN, I will agree on ATA/IDE if you only have a single drive. However, if you have multiple hard drives then the benefits of SCSI really shine. As to graphics cards, again, for running UG, SW, MC I don't want to put my money into something designed for Quake, Doom, Flight Sim or gaming in general. Since I make money with CAD/CAM, I will spend the money to get a CAD/CAM card. Dual procs - SW is multi-threaded in some areas, here is and excerpt for the SW Knowledge base: "There are low level operations in SolidWorks’ modeling algorithms which use multi-threading (e.g. Boolean, silhouettes, line generations, mass properties, body check). These operations become multi-threaded in SolidWorks operations like a cut-extrude or a boss. However, SolidWorks doesn't use the low-level modeling algorithms on a one-to-one bases, therefore the overall effect may be hard to determine based on the configuration of the body and the complexity of the topologies. The most obvious area of improvement the user can see is in mass properties and in body checking because those operations directly use the low level modeling algorithms. In general, the solving process used for parametric modeling is by nature very linear and cannot take full advantage of parallel processors. Please note that SolidWorks does not do any specific benchmarking to determine speed gains in SolidWorks from a second processor. Certain operations will benefit form a multithreaded environment, but SolidWorks cannot provide any statistical information on such benefits at this time." One area that you will see increased performance with dual procs and 3DLabs cards is dynamic rotation, view changes, redraws, etc. across the board. Many Oxygen cards take advantage of multithreading and can show performance improvemants, according to what I've read on 3DLabs site.

Here's my $0.02. SCSI and get multiple drives. I'm running 5 SCSI hard drives from 4.5GB to 18GB. Smokes any IDE. Fujitsu 18GB, Ultra160, 10K RPM, 8MB cache, $169 (I've got two of these, one for data, the other as a mirror), One Quantum 9GB Ultra160, 10K,4MB cache $59 (boot drive), one IBM 9GB Ultra2(mirror of boot drive) and one IBM 4.5GB Ultra2 as my pagefile drive. Once I upgrade my Adaptec 2940U2W to the 29160, lookout. Video - for CAD/CAM, get a CAD/CAM card, not a gaming card. GeForce cards are geared towards gaming. Sure they will work, but for the same or less money you can get a 3DLabs Oxygen GVX1 or such that are rock stable. RAM - 512MB minimum. DDR will save you some serious $$$ and since the Front Side Bus (FSB) on a P4 runs at 400Mhz, you are not wasting $$ on RDRAM. Processor - Dual and I'm an Intel fan although AMD has made incredible strides over the last couple of years.

Eons ago, I worked for a company that manufactured drafting templates and other custom plastic machining. We used Kennard seven-spindle routers milling Butyrate, Plexiglass, Acrylic, etc. One of the real benefits of those controls was the "step & repeat" function. This is how it worked, as I can remember: % O0000 (PROGRAM NAME - T) (DATE=DD-MM-YY - 18-04-02 TIME=HH:MM - 07:08) (1/4 FLAT ENDMILL TOOL - 1 DIA. OFF. - 1 LEN. - 1 DIA. - .25) N100G20 N120G0G17G40G49G80G90 N140T1M6 N160G0G90G54X-.625Y-.25A0.S2139M3 N180G43H1Z1. N182M24 (Begin Step & Repeat) N200Z.1 N220G1Z0.F6.42 N240X-.375 N260G3X-.125Y0.R.25 N280G1Y1. N300G2X0.Y1.125R.125 N320G1X1. N340G2X1.125Y1.R.125 N360G1Y0. N380G2X1.Y-.125R.125 N400G1X0. N420G2X-.125Y0.R.125 N440G3X-.375Y.25R.25 N460G1X-.625 N480G0Z1. N482M25 (End Step & Repeat) N484M26X2.Y2. (First S & R) N486M26X4.Y4. (2nd S & R) N488M26X2.Y4. (3rd S & R) N490M26X4.Y4. (4th S & R) N495M27 (Return to program) N500M5 N520G91G28Z0. N540G90 N560M30 % As I recal there was no limit to the number of M26 commands. We routinely had programs where we would cut 32, 64 parts out of one sheet of plastic (Collins Aviaonics radio faces). This seemed to work better than work offsets and had virtually no limit to how many parts you could run other than travel limits. These were the only controls I have seen with this feature. Just wondering if I missed something through all these years. That was back in the mid '80s. You can't even imagine the programming system. Tons on trig drawing out wvery shape and figuring every intersection, line, arc, etc. , then entering it into a PDP-11 using 8-inch floppies. Then if you were lucky, you could RS-232 out to a control at 1200 baud. If not, print it out and manually key it into the control. Thank God for technology. [ 04-18-2002, 09:21 AM: Message edited by: Jerry Bichsel ]

For design and programming needs specializing in Injection Molding (although I do have experience in Thermoforming also), check out www.cad-mark.com (me). Jerry Bichsel

Big Dog, I have been designing injection molds for 4+ years in SW and love it. Before that is was Cadkey and MC. I've been doing this since 1989. But remember.... Nothing ever works as easily as the demo, but SW drawings are very easy to create/modify and are fully associative, so if you make changes to the model your drawings will update as soon as you loadd the drawing file. As to importing to MC, great! You can choose whether you want to import solids or surfaces, with or without wireframe. I regularly import files from SW to MC for clients to view or for programming. Awesome combination. [ 04-17-2002, 01:01 PM: Message edited by: Jerry Bichsel ]

I don't mean to be inflamatory but constructive. So many companies come out with video cards that are directed more at 'gaming' rather than what we do, 'working'. The focus is different for these gamiing cards and the results we see on CAD/CAM is oftenless than stellar. I learned long ago that a card designed more for CAD/CAM is a much more reliable, stable platform beings that 99% of what I do is NOT gaming. I currently use a 3DLabs Oxygen VX1, 32MB AGP card, Viewsonic 21" P815 at 1600x1200@85Hz in a dual P-III 650Mhz, 512MB RAM with four (5) Ultra2 SCSI drives. Since I also run SolidWorks, I set up the card to optimize for SW and things run great. I have never had a problem with this setup in two years. It also runs all my Office apps fine, flicker free. I do sometimes play games and while I may not get the frame rates that 'gaming' cards do, I can rely on the fact that the apps I make money with are rock stable.

Mick, I agree about not letting people look over my shoulder when I'm programming at home. Rarely has a client ever come to my home other than to pick up a disk, CD, setup sheets, shop drawings, I design also). But if I am programming at a clients site, then by all means they have the right to watch. However, if their questioning begins to interfere I will ask them to please let me concentrate and I will be glad to go over anything they want once I am finished. Never had a problem with that.

Everyone makes mistakes and no software is perfect. 1. When you quote a job you need to have a disclaimer for what you are/are not responsible for. 2. Double and triple check your work BEFORE you give it to the client. Just remember, sometime something will slip past. 3. Insist that the client review the geometry, backplot, verify, NC code, what ever they can BEFORE the run anything. Most clients will understand that mistakes happen. Most are good about how they handle it and what they can do on their side to minimize the effects, i.e. having an operator at the machine with their finger resting on the STOP button. If errors are found in my program, I redo it at no charge.If the errors are serious enough, I will credit an agreed amount (only done this twice) or refund the full amount (never had to) if extreme. The best thing you can do is let your client know that you stand behind your work. I once even went to a clients shop and ran my programs and some of theirs on their VMC when one operator was sick and another quit. No charge. It builds loyalty and respect, both ways.

Kenneth, I agree that each shop is operated differently and I too, adjust my rates/quotes accordingly. But I also train and try to get Mastercam sales. I have no problem with answering questions on how to do such-and-such in Mastercam, how to configure it, etc. I have several customers that I have been working with for over five years that have upgraded, have programmers and still use me. I figure the more they learn the more opportunity they have to grow, become more efficient and provide more opportunity for me. So far it is working well.