There is a powerful new tool in Mastercam 2017 that makes your lathe program setup faster than ever before. It is called Align Solid Body. In previous versions we would have used transform or plane functions that, while extremely powerful, were still designed for general use with all the Mastercam products, which could be confusing. The new Align Solid Body tool instantly gets the job done with a few simple clicks. The 3D solid model [...]
The interactive Gview gnomon for dynamic planes is an exciting new shortcut in Mastercam 2017. In previous versions, the Gview indicator gnomon located in the lower left corner of the graphics window was merely a passive indicator, showing the current graphics view relative to the system coordinate set. Also, while the dynamic plane tool was easily accessed, you would have to set it in place temporarily to activate face alignment. Now, in Mastercam 2017 the [...]
Today we will explain how to replace subassemblies with multibody parts, a new function in SolidWorks 2016. Unlike previous versions of SolidWorks, in 2016 you can use a multibody part as a simplified representation of the assembly. When you make changes to the subassembly and save an updated multibody part, this version can replace the older copy without having to recreate the mates. Consider the assembly shown above. It contains two individual parts and two [...]
Welcome to the second in our “Mastercam Monday” series, which will cover some Tips and Tricks using the newly-released Mastercam 2017. Today we will cover the new Mastercam 2017 user interface. Mastercam 2017 is focused on delivering more speed and efficiency to every aspect of your machining tasks. It features a new tabbed ribbon interface, similar to the Microsoft office products which helps capitalize on your navigation experience from other software, making it easier to [...]
Multi-session Support is a new enhancement to Mastercam 2017 that will greatly benefit people who need to work on multiple projects at the same time. In previous versions, if you tried to open more than one Mastercam window at the same time the system would display a warning message. Instability and data loss could be a problem. Now, in Mastercam 2017 multiple instance support has been added with no restriction on the number of Mastercam [...]
In today's episode of “What’s New in SolidWorks 2016” I’m going to show you an enhancement to sheet metal flanges that will allow you to create edge flanges that are longer than the edge to which they are attached. In previous versions of SolidWorks, an edge flange feature would default to the length of the edge of the sheet metal part with no options to manipulate the flange length. This is no longer the case. [...]
This month we will begin our “Mastercam Monday” feature, which will cover some Tips and Tricks using the newly-released Mastercam 2017. Today we will cover how to update your X9 resource files to Mastercam 2017 using the Migration utility. To begin, let’s create a temporary source folder for the Migration Utility to access and call it “Update.” Next, place a copy of the contents of the Shared Mcamx9 folder inside this “Update” folder. This will [...]
SolidWorks 2016 includes an enhancement to sweeping solids, cuts, and surfaces that will allow you to create a solid rod or hollow tub along a sketch line, edge or curve directly on a model without having to create a new sketch. This is possible with the new “circular profile” option in sweeping operations. The example part above has several edges that can be used as sweep paths. In order to cut a tube through the [...]
