In the world of CAD/CAM, there are those systems that work outside your CAD tool, and those that work within – one of the leading lights in the SolidWorks-integrated CAM line-up is SolidCAM. Al Dean takes a look at release 12.

When looking at CAM, there are several factors of varying importance to consider, depending on your perspective. Firstly, do you integrate your CAD system or not? Both have benefits and disadvantages. Integrated is good if you don’t have an existing CAM system in-house and can find a CAD system that suits your requirements. Standalone is perhaps better if you have multiple CAD systems and need to work with data from all of them. On top of this, there’s the question of who’s going to use it? Is it based in the design office, with the designer creating the tool-paths and sending them down to the shop-floor, or is the machinist going to run it? Again, both have good points and bad. The good news is that with SolidCAM, it’s a pretty good fit for all these scenarios.

But before we get onto that, let’s take a look at how it works and what’s new – then explore the potential for implementation.

Coming from the same stable, SolidCAM is fully integrated into the SolidWorks interface. The rate at which the system keeps up to date with the latest releases is impressive. SolidWorks 2008 was a huge release in terms of user interaction and I’m impressed that SolidCAM’s development team has been able to bring out a compliant version so quickly. Essentially, if you can use SolidWorks, then you’re most of the way to knowing how SolidCAM works.

As with all such processes, the starting point is the part you want to machine. SolidCAM’s installation process creates a pull down menu and an additional FeatureManager panel to the left hand side of the screen. While you start things off from the menu, the rest of the process is driven by the FeatureManager and on screen interaction. The first stage is to choose the CNC controller then define a co-ordinate system and datum (which can be a selected face, a centre of revolution for turned parts or normal to the current view if you’re programming 5-axis work). You then begin to define the working parameters of the part, such as the Stock and Target model.

Immediately, the high-level SolidWorks integration pays dividends as you can take advantage of configurations held in your part file to hold perhaps casting with machining allowance and the final end result (the target). You could also load STL, surface or just use a plain old billet block model that auto sizes to the part (or can be adjusted to suit). The support for configurations can also pay real benefits when you’re dealing with the production of families of parts or variants, as each can be stored in a single part file, with a single associated machining process and you can very quickly create the individual NC code for each family member or variant by simply updating the SolidCAM operations.

The final set-up process is to define the material you’re working with. This is taken from a set-up database and at the same time defines the speeds and feeds for your operations. When you’re done, the system builds a hierarchical tree in the SolidCAM FeatureManager panel which gives you direct access to everything with that machining program.

Operations

The next step is to start adding operations. As you might expect for a system that runs the NC gamut from 2.5-axis, 3-axis, high-speed machining, and into the realms of 5-axis simultaneous and mill/turn production, SolidCAM has all the bases covered – so let’s look at some of the new features and how they work, to give you a flavour of the workflow.

The new Facing operation runs you through the typical wizard driven workflow. At all times within SolidCAM, you’re given a great deal of feedback about the process you’re working on and where information needs to be filled in. The selection of work areas is done using edge chains to define a boundary (incidentally, these can be saved and reused) then you define the tool. SolidCAM has an ever improving cutter library, and will now connect to third party libraries from a variety of suppliers.

You then define the upper and lower levels that you’re working with, either selecting from the model or using the stock model values. You define the variables for the facing operation, how it machines the faces, the tool offset, whether pocket floors are finished or not, and, if you’re using such machine tools, the various parameters for high-speed machining.

Simulation

Simulation is something that’s becoming ever more critical in the machining world. The ability to simulate a tool-path before committing cutter to increasingly costly tool-steel has always been a requirement, but in today’s market with high-speed, 5-axis and multi-spindle mill-turn machine tools it is becoming the standard rather than the exception. This release sees the introduction of technology developed by MachineWorks (www.machineworks.com). Targeted at users creating highly complex tool-paths, where performance is a problem, the new Multi-Cut simulation tools are designed to reduce the time taken to simulate a series of operations from hours to a matter of minutes.