Why i love Surfcam

Ok, so i love Surfcam, i have been using it since 1998. I am 52 years old, and work as a cnc operator, designer, idéer, constructor, bla bla bla.
I am A Swede, and the company i work for is very small, about 8 people, and nearly everyone make their own programs. We are a lego company.
Sorry if i am bragging. :)

Now we dont have a service deal anymore with Surfcam, and the boss have decided to scrap Surfcam for Mastercam, and i dont like that.
Now Mastercam was sort of a copy of Surfcam back in the 90:s or reverse, but i just hate the X versions. Dont get me wrong, Mastercam is big for a reason. But as i work with fast
prototyping, Surfcam is awesome. I can draw lines, circles, splines in a blink, an post out code for milling very fast. And Postform is a great processor for
making cnc code, or posthaste, as it is called. (Mastercam do not support it) I can make my own Processor with it, and that is great. Also, i have tried Gibbscam, and what a joke for me, stupid for fast drawing.

Also, With surcam i can print exact contours on paper for comparison, witch i do a lot. I also have been using the monitor to copy things for renovations, since i can
set the monitor to 1:1 scale. And the verification is awesome, i use it a lot for 3D printing, since it comes out as a .stl file.

Now the downside, it is a bit buggy, things i learned on the way. So i save very often. :)
And also, it do not support solid drawing. A big floor back.

/Anders.

Anders, thanks for sharing your experience with Surfcam. We have used Surfcam since 1996 but stopped upgrading after 2012 do to lack of real improvements but still use it today. We also use Keycreator for drawing and solid modeling. We keep Keycreator updated mainly for the CAD translators, which are excellent. Besides Surfcam's poor interface, It's a good program and we trust Surfcam to make good code. I used Mastercam for about 7 years prior to using Surfcam and found the programs to be very similar back then, so the transition to Surfcam was pretty easy.

We had Hexagon come in today to show us the improvements from our current 2015 R2 version to the 2019 version. We dropped maintenance in 2016. 2 of our programmers started using a new software that year while 1 stayed with Surfcam. During his 1 hour long demo he got 3 fatal exception warnings and Surfcam shut down twice. I will now apologize to Moldcore for giving him(her?) hell for ranting about Surfcam all those years ago. Sorry Moldcore!

I have used surfcam for 20 years, pretty much every single version from Surfcam 7.0 back in 1999. It has had some pretty bad bug bombs in there too. But overall it is a great program. It is easy to learn, it is straight forward and VERY quick to get code out compared to most other CAMs (Mastercam,Gibs, Edgecam). And as op said, drawing in it is very simple and quick.

I could have 3D model of an injection mold imported in and have roughing going on a machine in less than three minutes. Try that on an EdgeCam.