[IMT]

I am looking at buying a CAM package that works inside Solidworks; HSMWorks, SolidCAM, VisualMill, CAMWorks, others??
If you use one I would like to hear about your experiences. What you like, what you don't, limitations, what kind of work you use it for etc...

Input would be greatly appreciated.

Dan

[budgieW]

Mastercam and Powermill also work in Solidworks. What type of work do you do? and what types of machines do you need to program?

[IMT]

I will look at PowerMill and MasterCAM also. Right now I do 3axis milling, almost all one-off parts so some ball endmill profiling instead of custom form tools and fixtures. Soon I plan on adding a 4th axis and possilby 5th axis indexing. CNC Lathe on of these days.
Which one do you use and what do you do with it?

[budgieW]

Software is a little like cars, some love brand XYZ others hate it. Having said that it is my opinion that there is no 1 size fits all in the CAM world. Each system has there strengths and weaknesses. I would be looking at a brand that has good local, on call support as there are always issues that need to be solved. If the tech guy is 4 hours away it will all end in tears at some point. Post processors are really the key, Your local tech guy needs to know how to edit, change, adjust etc etc. Never believe the sales hype, "Yeah we have a post for that". If the guy says we will write you a post, what he means is we will work together on getting it right and it will take about 6 months and a few blown up tools.

Personally I would be nervous purchasing a third party addin to solidworks, Do a quick search on HSMworks sale to autdesk or better still talk to some users. If you already own solidworks then there may be no other reasonable choice, If not then take a look at NX.

As you are looking at a addin that runs in Solidworks I can really only help you with Mastercam as that is the only one of that list that I have used. Most of the modern milling packages are very capable at 4 and 5 axis work as a large majority of them now use the moduleworks kernal. Do a search on moduleworks and you will see who uses it, and don't believe the sales BS that system XYZ is better......

In my opinion Mastercam is good at all milling work 2D, 3D, 4 axis and 5 axis and terrible at lathe and anything to do with lathes. Althought there is now a "new" mill/turn addin, time will tell how that runs. I have used it to make 1 offs, and production parts from very simple to very complex, a few are here

GW2220 - YouTube

Perhaps others can give you an honest opinion about the other solidworks add-ins

[BanduraMaker]

I have VisualMill 2012 Pro for solidworks - that's the package that has 4-axis + "advanced" tool paths. Overall, I think it's pretty good bang for your buck. I've not used any other CAM packages so it's really difficult for me to compare. From the demos and whatnot that I've seen of other packages it seems that VM is toward the top of the list of "low cost" CAM packages but the higher priced ones (more than double the cost of VMPro) definitely out do VM.

I really like the integration into solidworks and I think it saves a ton of time when tweaking designs.

There are two glaring omissions in VM for solidworks though.

1) It doesn't work at all in assemblies. There are work arounds though: you can save an assembly as a part but I can't recall how the updating feature works when you do that. This is important to me mostly because in certain situations I need the fixture in the model when I'm making tool paths. According to MecSoft, adding this support is on the short list of features to be added.

2) No configuration support - if you use a lot of configurations (which I do), VM doesn't have any specific features to deal with this. i.e. you there's nothing like suppression of machining operations for certain configurations or anything like that. You can still use configurations but you'll have to re-gen the tool paths any time you switch configurations. This is not a huge problem and I don't know if any other CAM packages have specific configuration support.

Overall though, I think it's a pretty good package and with the same budget, I'd do it over again. If I had a bigger budget, I'd probably look into SolidCam.

[BTP]

I've used CAMWorks, HSMworks, and SolidCAM. CAMworks is out the window right off the gate. Not user friendly at all and I hated the way the work flow was handled. HSMworks is great software, very easy to learn, OKAY functionality but limited in some areas. SolidCAM has a moderate learning curve, very good work flow, tons of options for controlling the toolpath to do exactly as you want to. Out of the three SolidCAM gets my vote. Another plus for SolidCAM is the free training online via the SolidCAM Professor.

IMO for software integration HSMworks takes the cake. When you use it, it feels like Solidworks created it. Most others you can tell it's a 3rd party software. It really depends on what you need it to do.

[andywarwick]

Delcam for Solidworks is probabley the best Solidworks CAM package about TBH, I've used a few in the recent years. The intergration is excellent and the quality of the toolpaths is the same as you get in Delcam's other products like FeatureCAM and Powermill. The full version is really easy to use and if you use the automatic feature recognition you can litterley program a part in seconds. I'm currentley using the free version DFSXpress to drive my 3-axis mill running EMC2 and i'm making some really nice 2.5D parts.
Have a look on the website: Delcam for SolidWorks: Integrated CAM for SolidWorks for milling machines, turning and turn/mill centres, and wire EDMS - www.delcamforsolidworks.com and download it for free, they even offer free online training videos to get you started using it!

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Andy

[IMT]

Thanks everyone for responding. I have looked at HSMworks and SolidCAM. Next will be DelCAM and Visual Mill.