There are several new enhancements to the Solid Modeling Sweep Command in Mastercam 2018. In previous versions, if your geometry changed direction by 5 degrees or more you would be required to do a fillet between the entities on the along curve. Now, the swept body can travel smoothly throughout.
Here we have some geometry in Mastercam 2017. The first two pieces of wireframe chain and produce a solid sweep that keeps the angle between the along curve and the profile curve throughout.
The last piece of geometry doesn’t produce any solid. You can see in the upper right corner we receive a warning message, informing us that the path curve is not smooth within 5 degrees.
If you open up this same part in Mastercam 2018, you will see the software handles these curves more efficiently. The first two profiles can actually have their cross-section alignment parallel to the original curve when being swept.
And, the new Solid Sweep command also handles the chain cleaner on the larger profile. There are no more error messages and we have a nice smooth transition along the fillets back to the sharp corners. There’s no longer a need to fillet the entire chain.
As you can see, the new improvements to the Sweep function in Solid modeling give us more flexibility in Solid creation and greater control when modeling.
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