Mastercam Design Tools
Mastercam’s “CAD for CAM” Design Tools Provide Flexibility and Ease of Use Mastercam is known for precision NC programming, but it also delivers a suite of shop-tested design tools aimed at getting parts on and off the machine as quickly as possible. Powerful modeling tools include not only 3D surfacing and solids, but hole-filling, direct editing without a solids history, geometry repair, and more. Mastercam Design streamlines and simplifies modeling and editing geometry. It also supports advanced geometry creation, including solid and surface modeling, hybrid machining, NURBS curves and surfaces, 2D and 3D associative dimensioning, surface extension, blending, trimming, splitting, variable filleting, and hybrid modeling to complete your jobs quicker and more efficiently. Solid Enhancements Mastercam Design has the power to recognize hole geometry—including intersecting and non-conventional holes—in solid bodies with no history. Once Mastercam discovers these holes, you can use expanded options to save your custom holes to a template for future use. Users can use Mastercam’s Add History function to detect complex holes in solid bodies. Simply select Hole operations to find all holes within the range of minimum and maximum radius values that are entered. Mastercam creates an operation for each unique detected hole style. Wireframe Enhancements Modifying geometry by [...]
Modeling a Car Tire with Geomagic Freeform
In this post, we will walk through how to create a tire model with deep treads using Geomagic Freeform. We will do this by applying the basics of Sub D modeling to create a real-world part. Let’s start by creating a Taurus. Inside the editing tools, we can see that we have 61,440 faces on Level 5. We have two planes here - the XY and YZ plane. For the XY plane, we keep Symmetry on because anything we do on the front of the tire we want to cross over to the back. We can turn off YZ Symmetry but we also need to create Radial Symmetry. Radial Symmetry allows for any changes to the shape to be perpetuated all the way around the circumference of the tire. Using a haptic device, we select an edge and click Radial. From here we can take the Control Cage, and promote it to level 2 which quadruples the number of faces. This gives us the ability to create finer details on the tire. It also creates a centerline of edges to manipulate for modeling. The first thing we want to do is create a Zigzag pattern. We select two of these edges and then [...]
Cimquest Now a Mastercam Educational Reseller
We are excited to announce that Cimquest is now an official Mastercam Educational reseller. This will bring educational customers and industrial manufacturers closer together for mutual benefit. With this change, educational institutions gain the benefit of greater connection with our industrial network of manufacturers using Mastercam. We can form a much-needed conduit between educational and industrial customers. This connection will enable better partnerships between schools and their local industry, which can lead to more effective and successful job placement for students. “Our industrial Mastercam Resellers provide a valuable connection between manufacturing firms and educational institutions tasked with preparing students to join the workforce, and they have the talent and expertise to support both. We identified this channel realignment as a way for us to help U.S. schools better prepare students with strong technical skills in CAD/CAM and CNC machining, to meet the immediate needs of industry,” shared Doug Nemeth, Director of Sales for the Americas, Mastercam. CNC Software, Inc. maintains an education department dedicated to supporting the educational market through sponsorships and involvement with organizations such as WorldSkills, SkillsUSA, Project MFG, National Robotics League, First Robotics, NASA HUNCH, and SAE International, as well as a partnership with TITANS of CNC Academy. The department [...]
How to Export Data out of Control X
This blog post will explain how to export data out of Control X to be used for review or downstream applications. Control X Metrology software allows you to leverage rich data to understand why parts are in or out of tolerance. In working with a CAD model, known as the reference data, when you select the reference data node, a window appears in the bottom left that shows how the model will appear in the report. If you want to change the angle, you can rotate the part and simply click as shown below to update the orientation in the report. Now let’s move on to the Measure Data, which is the actual scan data. For Datums, there are three datums to fins, two flat faces of A and B, and datum C for the cylinder. Under Compare, there are multiple color maps including a standard one and then a Go-No Go color map, which simply shows what is inside tolerance and what is outside of tolerance. Below we have a whisker plot which is essentially a 2D color map. The black line is the exact geometry of the CAD model, and the colors are the cross-sections of the scan. Hovering over the [...]
Williams Racing Announces Partnership with Nexa3D
Williams Racing recently announced a new partnership with Nexa3D, bringing the fastest polymer 3D printing to the world of Formula One. Beginning this month, Nexa3D’s NXE400 ultrafast photoplastic 3D printer will be available to manufacture functional wind tunnel parts for aero testing purposes. The company’s NexaX software will enable high-performance additive manufacturing processes using modern computation architecture to develop light-weighted parts and accelerate the file-to-part process. With Nexa3D’s technology, Williams Racing will be able to quickly design and manufacture complex, light-weighted parts in minutes, compared to hours with traditional manufacturing, while minimizing material usage and waste. The NXE400 breaks printing speed barriers with its 20X productivity through its proprietary Lubricant Sublayer Photo-curing (LSPc) technology and patented structured light matrix capable of reaching top speeds of 1Z centimeter per minute. Al Peasland, Head of Technical and Innovation Partnerships at Williams Racing said, “We’re extremely excited to announce our partnership with Nexa3D and look forward to enhancing our additive manufacturing capabilities with their innovative high-speed printing technologies. Formula One is a challenging environment, that demands a continuous improvement philosophy in order to remain competitive. Our partnership will enable the team to continue to push boundaries in 3D printing, and present new opportunities for Nexa3D to [...]
Mastercam Mill Streamlines the Manufacturing Process
Mastercam Mill offers expanded machining flexibility and an increased emphasis on speed and automation. Multiaxis features, 3D enhancements, and 2D high speed toolpaths combine with dozens of additional new enhancements in a software package intended to improve shop floor productivity. Here are some of the significant highlights and new functionality in Mastercam Mill: Mastercam Multiaxis Improvements Maintaining climb and conventional machining is crucial for surface finish and tool life. Controlling Climb and Conventional Cutting for Morph, Parallel, Unified, Project Curve, and Flow toolpaths now provide constant control of climb or conventional cutting even while in complex areas that would require use of both sides of the tool. The new 3+2 Automatic Roughing toolpath automatically makes multiplane 3-axis toolpaths for roughing. Mastercam analyzes the model and stock, and then creates a roughing toolpath. Mastercam calculates the remaining stock and computes a new toolpath. This continues until only a defined amount of stock remains, and results are all contained within one toolpath. Multiaxis Roughing has been enhanced and renamed to Multiaxis Pocketing and includes new options such as undercut roughing, wall finishing, and floor finishing. Multiaxis Pocketing provides greater control of the tool contract point and machining angle when using Accelerated Finishing® tools and ensures [...]