Dear all,

we use solidworks for our 3d CAD but don't have any CAM. We've had some reps out from solidCAM a few weeks ago and EdgeCAM today and are trying to determine which would be best for us. We primarily make injection moulds but we're also branching into manufacturing and designing some machines. SolidCAMs main benefit seems to be ease of use, being integral to SW, however that also ties us to using solidworks for evermore (well at least to get the maximum benefit) which is something we don't want to undertake lightly.

EdgeCAM appeared (from the demo the sales reps gave us) to allow more tweaking of tool paths etc and is standalone but we'll have a new user interface to learn.

Training and outlaying costs seem to be about the same for either (no real suprise there) but i was interested in some opinions from people using these in industry. I'm aware the this is primarily an autodesk oriented forum so won't be surprised if the answer is a resounding EdgeCAM verdict but it would be good to know why!

Thanks.
David

I'm sorry, I can't give you any opinion on the questions you ask, but I think I can give you some background on pros and cons. I haven't used either of the programs you are wondering about, but I have used a program that was stand alone and one that was integrated and I will give you of what I think are pros and cons.

I have used Gibbscam and I have used Pro/E with the Pro/Manufacturing CAM module. Gibbscam is standalone and Pro/Manufacturing is made by PTC and integrated into Pro/E. Holes are one of the biggest problems in CAM files. In a stand alone program you can't tell if a hole is tapped or through or a pipe tap or a reemed hole. When you pass a part from a CAD package to a CAM package, that info doesn't come through. So if you are trying not to make a drawing, that is difficult to do in a stand alone program. With Gibbscam there is a hole manager that can "read" what type of hole it is based on a hole diameter. If you have a unique hole diameter set up from every type of hole, it can automate drilling and tapping.

Pro/Manufacturning was also supposed to be able to be more seamless because when the model updates, the CAM file will update too. Well, Pro/Manufacturing could only handle very minor changes before it required a do over, so I kind of throw the plus out of the equation for the integrated part. You may want to let your programmers have a glimpse of each program. Pro/Manufacturing and Gibbscam both were CAM products, but it was very easy to see that Gibbscam was designed by people that understand machining, and Pro/Manufacturing was designed by a CAD company.

So you might want to find out what the link is between the cad program and the cam program. Find out how each program handles holes. And I know you don't want to complicate things further, but if you haven't gotten a visit from your local Gibbscam rep for a demo you really really should. That program just works. There is so much control and yet it is very easy to use and powerful. Their tagline is "Powerfully Simple, Simply Powerful" and they aren't telling you any lies.

Hi and thanks for the reply.

I'd seen your recommendations about GibbsCAM on another post when i was searching through earlier, unfortunately we're trying to get something sorted out relatively soon as we have some big jobs approaching that we'd like to use it with and we've already waited a month while reps find time to visit us - we shouldn't be too hasty but currently we're modelling parts in SW and our machinist is manually drafting them in the pre-processor of our NC machine... rather slow and expensive!

Both EdgeCAM and SolidCAM are associative to the model so can extract the hole information for example. I'm leaning towards EdgeCAM at the moment not least because SolidCAM kept crashing when the reps gave us a demo (on their own laptop!) and the demo software available for download doesn't seem to work properly either (graphic artifacts and display issues on a descent core i7 nvidia workstation with 12gb of ram, win7 x64).

I think we're going down to SolidCAM's labs on Monday to get a hands on tutorial to see how we get on using it, but any further suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
THanks.
David