I teach a new manufacturing course to students at a high school tech center. We currently use SolidWorks for most of our design work. We also have a Haas TM1, a Haas TL1, and some smaller educational CNC machines.
I am currently trying to decide between CAMWorks and GibbsCAM for our CAM needs.
Any recommendations?
Thanks,
Eric

i might be wrong, but from what i see, Mastercam is the one to use.not from any other perspective except most of the jobs i see ask for mastercam experience. i haven't used Camworks, but i do use Gibbs and it is actually fairly easy to understand. it can be a powerful program depending on your options. i have 2.5 solids.

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately it is a cost issue for us. MasterCAM, for the number of seats that I require, would run 5 times more than CAMWorks or GibbsCam.
Eric

Hey Eric,

As an experienced user of both Camworks (or Damnworks as I call it) and Gibbs. I personally would go with Gibbs. Camworks is nice, in a way, as it works directly in Solidworks but Gibbs is way more powerful and a lot easier to use. Besides Gibbs does direct import of Solidworks files. One of the biggest complaints I and everyone else I know that uses or has used Camworks is that it is not reliable. When you go to make changes and re-process a part Camworks will renumber tools and screw everything up. If you are teaching students to be machinists you need to give them something reliable and powerful to start out with. Gibbs is definitely your best bet. As to the fact that most employers want someone with Mastercam experience, I can tell you that with my over 10 years of experience with Gibbs, whenever I have looked for a job, I get tons of phone calls just because I have experience with Gibbs.

Sean

Hi Eric
If you are able to get Gibbs it would be the best choice of the two it works well with Soildworks and is easy learning

My vote goes to GibbsCam. Been using it now for over 10 Years. Simple on 2d and 3d. Does a good job on basic CAD 2d wire frame and solids. Produces good posted code for your machines. Great for importing files from other CAD systems. Best value for the money bar none.

Have used gibbs and mcam for many years. favored gibbs until mcam7. Now prefer mcam. Many beginners have trouble with chaining(turning geometry blue due to reverse arcs, double lines etc.)with gibbs. Have you priced mcam with "nethasp" for multiple seats?

teacher...did you contact the EDU division of Mastercam or the industrial division?

Mastercam will GIVE you all the student seats you need for FREE.
And Mastercam is the most widely used Cad Cam software on the planet!
Do your kids a favor and teach them software that they can use in more shops then any other kind.

Thanks for all the response; still working on the decision. As far as MasterCAM I contacted the vendor for our school system and sent me a qoute for $18k for the 19 seats I need. How is it possible to get it cheaper or better yet free for educational use?

We also have ProE, and I understand I can purchase the advanced school edition that comes with CAM capabilities. What is everyone's opinion on use ProE for CAM.

Thanks again for all of the great advice

Hey Teach,

If you are still interested I have used both Pro NC and Camworks. I am a Manufacturing Engineer, I presently program and run tooling for plastics Ind. using both 2d and 3d. I have found that CW is by far the better choice. It is millions times easier to use as is Solidworks over Pro-E. I have also used MC, Solidcam, and BobCam with CW easiest and most powerful to use. Once you learn to use the tech db everything will get so much quicker.

Hey Teach,

If you are still interested I have used both Pro NC and Camworks. I am a Manufacturing Engineer, I presently program and run tooling for plastics Ind. using both 2d and 3d. I have found that CW is by far the better choice. It is millions times easier to use as is Solidworks over Pro-E. I have also used MC, Solidcam, and BobCam with CW easiest and most powerful to use. Once you learn to use the tech db everything will get so much quicker.

Thanks for the information. We are most likely going to go with CAMWorks - if it is anywhere close to being as easy as SolidWorks then it should work for high school students.
MasterCAM never was able to give us a very good price (even with the hasp option) - it's unfortunate because some of these students are future people in the industry - seems to me the earlier you can hook someone on your product then the more likely they will insist on it in the future - probally why educators/students can get ProE so cheap.

Have used gibbs and mcam for many years. favored gibbs until mcam7. Now prefer mcam. Many beginners have trouble with chaining(turning geometry blue due to reverse arcs, double lines etc.)with gibbs. Have you priced mcam with "nethasp" for multiple seats?


Chaining is no trouble if you know how to teach Gibbs. Arcs are easy to change just by clicking the arc and pressing Ctrl-T, Double lines are easy to fix too, there is a feature in Gibbs that will remove any doubles automatically.

This forum is quite old, but I am very interested in the subject. I recently switched companies and was forced to go from CamWorks to Gibbs. I'm having so much trouble with Gibbs. Everything seems so difficult. I know all the features are there, building tooling libraries, processes, and modifying your post. It's just that CamWorks worked so well with Solidworks. The biggest downfall to Gibbs is that you have to learn a new CAD system also. With CW you use SW to do all of your sketching. Gibbs is a very difficult system in my opinion. I was very happy with CW. If anybody wants to discuss, let me know.

Hi Don28
I use Gibbs & find it to be the easyest out there to learn when I first used Gibbs I was making code & running a machine in under 15min & I had never seen it before are you doing 3D or 2D 3D is harder, but most work is only milled in 2D Gibbs can take your SW
files in different ways DXF IGUS are the most common there are other formats that work
to, The drawing is also easy I mostly only do 2D if I have to in Gibbs I have not had any
training on Gibbs but if you are having trouble I would take there classes

This forum is quite old, but I am very interested in the subject. I recently switched companies and was forced to go from CamWorks to Gibbs. I'm having so much trouble with Gibbs. Everything seems so difficult. I know all the features are there, building tooling libraries, processes, and modifying your post. It's just that CamWorks worked so well with Solidworks. The biggest downfall to Gibbs is that you have to learn a new CAD system also. With CW you use SW to do all of your sketching. Gibbs is a very difficult system in my opinion. I was very happy with CW. If anybody wants to discuss, let me know.

Hi Don28,

Gibbs will open native Solidworks files without having to translate via Iges, DXF, Parasolid, etc. Just change your drop down when opening a file and select Solidworks part or assembly. What version of Gibbs are you using? In the newer versions of Gibbs there are a couple of handy tools that really help with geometry creation especially for beginners. One is the edge selection at the top when you select this, the model shows all of the edges of the part and you can highlight and extract those. Second is the profiler (which is right next to edge selection). With the profiler tool you can drag the green surface that shows up when turned on and select the geometry from there and either extract it or use directly from the profile tool. A couple of extremely cool things that Gibbs can do that I haven't seen in any other software is the ability to draw your own tool shape and then create a tool based on that shape. Then Gibbs knows exactly what your form tool looks and cuts like and that is exactly what you will get when posting out a program. Another cool thing is by using the 2D geometry you can create whatever kind of toolpath you want and make the tool follow exactly that path. I will agree that Gibbs can be kind of tedious in building the tools, but, your reseller should have given your company a disk that has a bunch of tool processes already created for Gibbs. Posts are kind of a mute issue as you have to have customized posts with any software package. As far as working with models, you actually don't have to extract geometry from the model to make Gibbs work. For Milling, you can actually get away with only using faces to machine with, Gibbs will do the rest. For holes, you can use AFR (Automatic Feature Recognition) and Gibbs will find and sort out the holes in the part and all you have to do is select the tools to use. Gibbs already knows the locations and depths of each of them. Another trick for you to know is that if you highlight a field like say for example the bottom of a pocket. Highlight the Z depth field in your tool process and then hold "Alt" key and click on the bottom of the pocket and the depth is automatically put into that field. This works for any field throughout the system whether top, bottom, side, etc.

Sean