Video series evaluation of SolidCAM

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...KMIlK7ELEFRor5

I did four videos about learning SolidCAM as part of an evaluation for what I will buy. SolidCAM is a little hard to use but better than MasterCAM. It does not label buttons in the dialog boxes so you have to remember what the icon stands for. You can hover over it, but that gets old fast. It does do some things MasterCAM could not, like create a geometry by just selecting two points. It also has a simulator far better than any other CAM program I have looked at. These programs are only ones that work inside SolidWorks, like SolidWorks CAM by CAMWorks, BobCAD CAM, VisualMill, and MasterCAM. HyperMill will not give me a demo since they don't want a novice user making YouTube videos. That tells me it is even more convoluted than MasterCAM. Very impressed by SolidCAM, both the company and the product, I just wish they would make it a little more straightforward.

SolidCAM does not give out a crippleware demo program, they give you a 60-day trial that will post and do everything else. To me, the program was better than MasterCAM by far, both for the simulator and for the lack of all those planes MasterCAM makes you construct. SolidCAM does not have a stand-alone version, you have to SolidWorks to run it as an add-in. SolidCAM is a little goofy in the way you create a part zero (Coordsys in their jargon) and in getting the stock set up. Once you get past those dialog boxes, it was similar to the other programs.