V6 needs to use solidworks sketches quite heavily to really work right, clicking model surfaces is just asking for trouble for anything complex until you get to 3 axis milling. This was days ago but I just joined this site and looking for some help and this was the forum page that I found the site on so I thought I would put my opinion in here for anyone else who comes looking. One would think selecting 'Simulation', it'd automatically compute toolpaths via the selections entered. If I don't tell each individual feature to compute the toolpaths, Simulation won't work. You can see the toolpaths for the tapped holes.Īny ideas? It'd be decent software if it'd work a little better. I've selected, separately, each feature of the counterbored holes, from the top, the sides, edges, the bottom, everything. However, every time I try to pick up the 4 counterbored holes, it won't recognize them in the 'select geometry' feature. I was able to get BobCAD to pick up the 8 tapped holes, and have it working in Simulation. The current project has 8 tapped holes, 4 counterbored holes, and a large hole in the middle. So, I've been working on BobCAD for simple projects. It will get the job done, but it's tedious to do small jobs, and it's going to catch up when I need to do more detailed projects. I understand the basic idea, but BobCAD is ridiculously clunky, and we're not going to spend 3x the software cost for a 2-day course that covers a lot of stuff I'll not be using.Ĭurrently, I've been programming longhand. I'm relatively new to CAD-CAM, although I've been working on SolidWorks for the last 2+ years, and I can make models decently.

We purchased the latest version of BobCAD-CAM for Solidworks, version 6, but I've been struggling.

Up until now, for the last few years, I've been making the models and prints, and then punching them in conversational on a ProtoTRAK machine.Īs much as I'd love to use Mastercam or Gibbs (Ideally, something that will plug into SolidWorks), the money's not there. Now I'm trying to make CAD-CAM efficient, and easy.

I finally got our tiny shop to buy a HAAS VF4.

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