[dbensavage]

Has Anyone used featurecam with a gangtool lathe? Any pro's or con's? My lathe has C Axis and live tooling. I want to start out with the basic 2 axis turn module and then step up to a turn/mill module down the road.

I'm currently demo-ing BobCad, OneCNC, and Featurecam. Featurecam seems to be the best but also the most expensive.

Bobcad doesn't really look like an option as there is no live tooling or c axis support at all. Onecnc was looking pretty good till I demo-ed Featurecam.

Any feedback or advice would be greatly appreciated. Just want to make sure I get the right CadCam software the first time and also make sure it woks well on the gang tool lathe.

Best regards,
Dennis

[paulcnc44]

I setup and program gt75 lathes and recently started using bobcad v23. With a little bit of training I started getting pretty good result's. Of course I can't do live tooling with bobcad, but so far the live tool operation's I've had to do on the omniturn's haven't been so difficult that I needed cad cam for them anyway. Just wanted to say the bobcad has allowed me to do some pretty elaborate stuff pretty quickly. I just wish there was a post for the omniturn's, I've been using a haas pp and editing the nc file for the omniturn.

[paulcnc44]

Also, most of my problem's with bobcad was when I was trying to run the demo. After I licensed it, most of the difficulties I was having with it went away. I would think if bobcad wanted to impress people with their software, they should fix their demo problems, it doesn't do justice to the licensed version. If they would let the demo run in full mode for 2 weeks, it would give people a chance to learn the software, get some result's, and then get "hooked" if it meets their needs. just my opinion.

[dbensavage]

Paulcnc44,
I ended up going with EZ-Cam. Learned the program fairly fast and they made a post for the omniturn. Have had some post problems but they correct the post when I let them know what the problem is.
Best regards and thank for the reply,
Dennis

[paulcnc44]

Paulcnc44,
I ended up going with EZ-Cam. Learned the program fairly fast and they made a post for the omniturn. Have had some post problems but they correct the post when I let them know what the problem is.
Best regards and thank for the reply,
Dennis

dennis,
really good new's man, glad to hear it. Funny, I actually have ez-cam on my computer at work, something left over from one of my predecessors. I took a look at it once, but I didn't really do anything serious with it.
Coincidentally enough, right before I checked my email and saw your reply, I checked bobcad's postprocessor page and they had brought in a post for the omniturn gt-75. I loaded a bobcad file, changed to the omniturn post, and ran it, then checked the code. It look's great! I didn't get around to giving them information for the post yet, so someone else did. God bless their little heart.
Good luck with the ez-cam man, I'll probably check it out again just out of curiosity. Maybe I'll need it in the future for for live tooling, who knows? Are the ez-cam pp's free, or did you have to pay extra for it?

[dbensavage]

Paulcnc44,
They included the post with the software. Not sure if they would charge you for the post or not. It would be worth a call just to see. I went with EZcam because of the C axis support and it was much cheaper than Feature Cam. Didn't want to learn Bobcad then have to learn another program down the road in order to be able to use the c axis.
Best regards,
Dennis