Becoming familiar with CAM: Turning Performance

When our computer system crashed and was down for a few days, we were forced to write our programs manually to keep the wheels of industry turning. That was an eye-opener. A job that would normally take minutes to program took more than 10 times as long, if we could do it at all. And when a program was finally written manually, there was little confidence in it—for good reason—because it was usually loaded with mistakes.

The CAM system we use is CAMWorks, from Geometric. We chose the software some years ago because it was the only CAM package at that time that could be integrated with Geometric’s SolidWorks on the modeling side. It has worked well for us.

One of the advantages of having the CAM software integrated with SolidWorks is that when you launch the SolidWorks application, the CAM application is immediately available for use.

Another benefit is that when working with a SolidWorks model, the toolpaths applied to the model with CAMWorks are saved in the SolidWorks file. It’s a compact, user-friendly arrangement.

Before I discuss how using CAM software makes my life easier, I’d like to point out that there are still jobs I feel more comfortable doing on manual, or conventional, machines. Jobs where the setup is skewed in some way come to mind. Our shop doesn’t have a 5-axis machine, so we have to tilt parts, which makes it difficult to pick a starting point.

For example, we ran one job on a CNC mill in which we had to put vent pinholes in about a dozen mold cavities. The cavities had to be tilted to get the holes in at the correct angle. We mounted a tooling ball on the cavities at a known location to get a starting point. The holes had to be close in diameter and precise in depth for the vent pins to press into them. The entire operation was risky.