Solidworks and Mastercam?

[APPENG]

Has anyone had any experience opening Solidworks files into mastercam directly? Files that contain lines and arc are working fine but anything that contains a spline entity causes problems... the spline gets broken down into very small lines and cause rough "faceted" surfaces, and mating pieces wind up with very poor fitup after machining.

Ideas anyone?

Regards,
Jon
jgbena@yahoo.com

 

[aamoroso]

I have not used mastercam in years but I do remember always having problems with arcs being programmed in quadrants (which always left a step in a round cutout every 90 degrees) thats the major reason I opted out of MasterCam and into SurfCam years ago. I imagine there is a similar thing hapening to your splines. I didn't take the time to look but you may want to look for a file converter to go from SW to MasterCam. Another option is to check the post processor with MasterCam and make sure the code is proper. Good luck and keep me posted on your results.

 

[rocheey]

The arc getting split into quadrants is a function of the Post processor, not the Application itself. MasterCam defaults to, I believe, a Fanuc 0m post, which has the greatest compatibility between NC's

 

[APPENG]

Very good... that is pretty much what I have been hearing... That Mastercam just does that on splines no matter what package they come from. So it turns out that its not just Solidworks which makes me happy. SolidCAM and WorkNC seem to do much better with them. I will let you guys know what happens.

thanks for input


Regards,
Jon
jgbena@yahoo.com