In SolidCAM you run drill recognition on your part. It turns your part transparent and highlights all the recognized holes and puts them into “Groups” in a “Holes Tree“.
The “Holes Tree” with its “Groups“ is a part of SolidCAM’s machining parameters user interface.
What this interface allows you to do is to use one tool, say a 1/2″ NC Spot drill, to spot and chamfer many different sized tapped holes at different Z depths. You have total control over the Z depth you wish to use because SolidCAM has provided a “Delta Depth” control that allows you to adjust the Z depth for each individual hole if you wish! Not only does SolidCAM do all of this and do it well but SolidCAM also does this with only:
One Machining Operation in the Machining Operations Manager for the same tool rather than loading up the Machining Operations Manager with many Machining Operations for the same tool like Mastercam does!
Notice in the last picture that Mastercam creates a total mess to edit and manage in its Machining Operations Manager. For this easy / simple part it created 3 separate machining operations in the Machining Operations Manager for the same tool… a 1/2″ spot drill, operations 20, 21 and 22. This very quickly becomes a total nightmare to manage efficiently.
Once again SolidCAM shows how they get what machinists/CADCAM programmers really want and need and have provided an efficient and elegant way to do it.
