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what is the fastest and best way to learn how to draw and program with gibbs I am used to bobcad and mastercam yet when i opened up gibbs i could not even create geometry any pointers on how to make some sort of progress would be greatly appreciated and also if you reply tell me why gibbs is better than mastercam.
I would recommend going thru the tutorials. Gibbs does use a different drawing strategy than mastercam. It is quite simple and once you get the hang of it, it is really quick. I programmed with Mastercam years ago and liked it. Now I do fulltime programming and use Gibbscam. I would hesitate to say one software is better than the other. Some of the strong points of Gibbs are 1. very simple to learn 2. tightly integrated with post processer, what you see on your computer is what you get on the machine. 3. very few bugs 4. Works very well with solids and models.
I second the idea of following the tutorials to learn geometry creation. The manuals are a little bland so it is hard to glean much from them, however. If your reseller offers training classes, and it is cost-effective, I'd consider those as well.
As for Gibbs v. Mastercam... do you prefer Coke or Pepsi? They both have sugar and caffeine, they both satisfy thirst, but they taste different. Gibbs and Mastercam both provide G-code, but they get there in different ways. I've used Gibbs exclusively since I started in the field back in '05, so that's what I like. I work with a guy who ran Mastercam for years before the company made the switch to Gibbs-only. Every day for weeks I heard about how much better Mastercam is than Gibbs, because it can do this, that, or the other thing. Eventually I showed him that Gibbs can also do some things better than Mastercam.
The biggest hurdle I had when learning Gibbs was the Geometery. Do the tutorials, That is what they are there for.
Other than that, the only other tip I can offer is you don't 'trim' the Geometery together, you 'connect' the Geometery together. That's why they are big dots at the end of every segment. You also can not have geometry overlaping each other, each chain must be drawn/connected together on it own chain. Use 'Workgroups' ('levels' as other Cad software call it) when working with overlaping geomerty.
I do love the power of Gibbs, I but I never cared for the CAD side of the software. You get use to it after awhile though.
Join gibbscam's forum and read the shortcut key thread's, lots of info there
As for geometry creation, it is quite different. However once you get use to just lots of parallel lines, and line's at angles, its pretty quick. I usually start with a rectangle my stock shape and then offset lines or lines at angle's to get my desired shapes.
I moved from Bobcad v23 to the newest gibbs (v11?) this past xmass, took about a week of scratching my head before everything made sense, now its all second nature.
-Jacob
thanks montie I started out wiith bobcad 17 and it worked ok i used it very poorly we then got version 23 but it had no way to helix bore or thread mill that I could figure out I used custom b macros along with projecting my own lines for too path. I then went to mastercam where everything was straight forward and real easy compared with bobcad now I am learning gibbs its only been a couple of days but I find it difficult to work with it thanks for the info about geometry creation but the hard part for me is that in gibbs there is no trimming entities
Just remember that when you connect it automatically trims. I also use Solidworks 2012 and right now if I need a fast sketch of a part I can actually do it faster in Gibbs. I really do like Solidworks though and if it is a complicated part I need to draw up I will use it instead of Gibbs.