The Cimatron website does a horrible job of showing how Cimatron works / is different.
I’m told that Cimatron is great at drilling holes compared to Mastercam. I’d like to understand the details of how Cimatron approaches drilling holes. I found a little tiny picture showing “Group List”, “Group Management and “Process Management”. Someone is supposed to know by looking at this picture how drilling in Cimatron works?
http://www.cimatron.com/TemplateControls/PictureInfo/PictureInfo.aspx?DocID=2101&FileID=158&lang=en
The rest of Cimatron’s website, like most CADCAM companies websites, isn’t very good at explaining how the rest of their CADCAM product works either.
In Mastercam I very frequently end up with many Machining Operations in Mastercam’s Machining Operations Manager for the same tool that for example I would use to spot 8-32, 10-32 and 1/4-20 holes with. The reason for this is because the spot/chamfer drill must be programmed to travel to different Z depths and Mastercam doesn’t give the user a decent way to handle the need for drilling to different Z depths when the geometry doesn’t exist on the right Z level. The latter is a very common occurrence for doing something like spotting/chamfering holes. I want just one Machining Operation for the same tool used to spot and chamfer holes that I can easily edit. Further, I don’t want to be forced to only work with a solid model to be able to do this. I want to be able to work with surfaces, splines, arcs, points or solids.
One would think by now that basics like drilling would have been properly addressed by all or most CADCAM companies. As I hope this blog makes very clear, it’s really the basics in most CADCAM products that are still badly broken or implemented extremely poorly.
I suspect that Cimatron actually put some time into thinking about how drilling really should be handled by a CADCAM system, unlike most other CADCAM companies but you’d never know it from their website or from their marketing.
A video showing how Cimatron does hole drilling is badly needed.
