Best 5 axis CAM, Mastercam, PowerMill, HyperMill, Catia etc

[smokey125]

Hello fellow CNCzone users,

First post and I'm after some advice!
I've read with interest some of the comments already posted on this sort of question.

The company I work for manufacture aircraft components we currently have 4, 5 axis machines used almost exclusively for continuous 5 axis profiling and drilling. We have used Mastercam for the last 8 years to program them. Initially with V8 then V9, we are currently running the last MR for V9. Due to various reasons we didn't update to X but are now looking at purchasing 1 or possibly more new 5 axis machines, for which we will need posts.

This leaves us with three options, get a post for V9 upgrade to the latest version of Mastercam or look at something different.
I think we would struggle to get a post for V9 and although I have quite successfully modified posts I don't think I could write one completely, time as much as anything.

What are people’s thoughts and opinions of the various 5 axis Cam packages? I have always found Mastercam itself adequate from the programming side of things but have found the posts to be lacking at times.
We did look at Hypermill when we upgraded to V9 and didn’t think it offered any more than Mastercam, but that could have been the salesman.

Any experience of CATIA interface/translators would also be interesting as a lot of our customers design in CATIA.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

[CNCRim]

Nothing can beat the experience.

Your case is easy one stay with Mastercam, the most important about getting a software is getting a support when run in trouble. And you already have that important ingredient is experience and know what the CAD/CAM capiblitity of Mastercam. Above all, you can get job done the first time, why bother change/switch other CAM.

Stay with MMMMMMMMMMastercam

[Superman]

I'm also leaning the way to mastercam.
yeh I'm a user..... and I do the same work as you

Your 5ax posts for the machines are already paid for and proven.
You are currently on V9.1MR2 ?

It is a simple proceedure for the reseller to have these stepped up to the X family

Plus you guys know Mcam, what to use, when to use, and where to find it.
Jump to up X4MU3, screen layout is a little different, more icons on the toolbar, both your choices and available strategies have grown ....big time.
Your only cost may be only getting onto "Maintenance" for Mastercam and any 3rd party add-ons or convertors ( STEP is standard )( Catia V4/5 is still 3rd party)

Go to another CADCAM system... and you have to start from scratch, buy posts, prove them off, learn the software, machine downtime for minor and major errors.....and a lot of stuffed parts

PS if you upgrade, make sure you get dual screens, and a PC that can handle multi processing to really speed things up, this includes a reasonable graphics card

[smokey125]

Thanks for the comments. Interesting points some of which I have already put forward in discussions here at work.

Currently using V9.1MR0105.

I’m aware that changing CAM system will mean the loss of knowledge we have gained with Mastercam and the inevitable learning curve that goes with new software. To be honest that doesn’t bother me too much as we have several other Cam software packages we use or have used and also have CATIA V5, Rhino and Vericut. It may also be worth the pain of learning a new system if we see better results.

The comments about posts are the most interesting one to me. From my point of view a post makes the CAM system and that’s what has always let us down with Mastercam, or possible with our reseller. All the 3 axis post I have modified quite heavily to get to the stage where I rarely need to edit the NC code before sending to the machine. Although I’ve done a similar thing with the 5 axis posts I still need to manually edit programs for 3 of our 4 machines just to get them to run. With some of the parts we’ve done recently the modifications to get a running program was minimal (minor feed changes) but I spent almost a day modifying the NC code to end up with a production ready program.

As a company we’ve grown a lot in the last few years and are bidding on and winning bigger and more complicated parts and although Vericut is a major help on the machine side it would be nice if the up front work was easier.

The cost element is of course important. However the last quote I had for upgrading Mastercam was a big enough number to make looking at alternatives a realistic option.

I'm certainly not discounting Mastercam but will be looking at what else the others have to offer.

[Brakeman Bob]

OK, here is my two penn'orth. We do 5 axis work and I think that there isn't much between the software packages in terms of strategies, possibly HyperMill is the leader (but I don't use it and I'm basing that opinion on what I have seen in the press and exhibitions). However I think that the post processor and the willingness of the reseller to do endless tweaks is crucial to success in five axis (and more importantly, avoiding collisions). So my advice is to go for a system that lets you edit the post to get the code you require. If your MasterCAM reseller will give the codes to get in and edit the post, that would be a very good solution. Another way would get M'CAM to output APT and then use something like Gpost from ICAM as the the post-processor (this is a very powerful piece of software). Alternatively, you could go for a CAM system that lets the user edit the post processor files - they are are around, but they don't shout about it.

We have been doing five axis for 3½ yrs now and I still make changes to the post, albeit infrequently, usually in areas like the handling of very long tools (45x dia) to avoid the workpiece or using drilling cycles to rough out a part. Thing is, we got the post we wanted and now I send code to the machine with no manual edits at all. That's worth rubies.

Bob

[CNCRim]

The post can be modified unlimited way with any CAM brand, just a phone call/email away, but it will cost you a leg/arm. The common problem I saw when come down to output the NC code from a CAM is everyone tries to customize to their way too much and I don't think manual editing will be go ever away unless you pay for one, that will be with any brand.

FYI: if something is repeatly need to edit, a microsoft word macro can easily fix with a click away.

[Brakeman Bob]

Originally Posted by CNCRim The post can be modified unlimited way with any CAM brand, just a phone call/email away, but it will cost you a leg/arm.

That is true for some packages, but not all. The CAM system we use, SolidCAM, allows the user full editing right and has reasonable documentation for writing post-processors. There are others. If you use CATIA to program (and here I might be a little rusty) you have to have a third party post processor and there we used GPost which is fully configurable by the user, so much so that we set up our probing cycles to be programmed via the CAM.

The common problem I saw when come down to output the NC code from a CAM is everyone tries to customize to their way too much and I don't think manual editing will be go ever away unless you pay for one, that will be with any brand.

Here I must disagree. Manual editing makes for errors and errors cause collisions. I have worked very hard at making my posts bomb-proof and as I said earlier, I don't make make manual edits to my code. I have even convinced my set-up guy that cutting & pasting with a 5 axis program isn't a good idea (he missed out a PLANE SPATIAL and nearly took the spindle through the A axis carriage). Some of my programs are over a million lines and finding the places to manual edit can be daunting.
In my experience, the dangerous times on CNC's are tool change, axis rotation and switching work offsets; these are the places in the code that need to be well thought out and hard-coded into the post processor. Add to that the way you want drill cycles to be handled and the way the control likes certain codes presented and you have a spec for your post processor. The trouble is when your rules don't cover every contingency and you have two choices - fix the post or manual edit. If you fix the post the problem goes away, if you choose manual edit you're going to be doing it forever.

FYI: if something is repeatly need to edit, a microsoft word macro can easily fix with a click away.

This is true and I have done it myself. Still do when I write programs longhand but instead of MS Word I use the macro tool in CIMCO Edit

[John@CRDM]

We run Mastercam X4 and Mikron VMC's but are looking to go into 5 axis.

We have had meetings with reps from Mikron and DMG and both have suggested Hypermill is the way forward for simultaneous 5 Axis machining.
I think it depends what machine you are looking to buy as to what CAM package you go with as certain machine builders have stronger links with certain CAM providers and therefore have stronger expertise in writing posts for those specific machines.

I think my preference would be to stick with Mastercam for our 3 axis machining and wire but move over to Hypermill for 5 axis.

On another note. I wouldn't discount buying a different CAM package on the basis of having to learn something new. In my experience once youve used a CAM package you can pick a new one up relatively easily and if the new package is potentially more powerful and more suitable then why stick with what you have?

[Maicky]

We did invest in a 5-axis high speed milling machine from DMG a few weeks ago. We are going to use the machine for simultaneous 5-axis machining. We had a long discussion with the guys from DMG about which would be the best cam-software choise for us.

They told us Powermill is a very good software but for simultaneous 5-axis machining they recommend Open Mind HyperMILL. They told us they have 6 cam-workstations in use for their application engineers. 5 of them work with HyperMILL and only 1 uses Powermill. I did also personally discuss with an application engineer and he told us he would choose HyperMILL without a doubt.

I got the feeling that if you only work in 3-axis or 3+2-axis indexing Powermill may be better and easier to use but if you want to be able to have a complete software with the most advanced and powerful possibilitys HyperMILL is the choise. I would not concider any other software than Powermill or HyperMILL, I think these two are a few steps ahead of the others.

[smokey125]

Thank you gentlemen for some very interesting and helpful replies.

Brakeman Bob, I agree with many of your comments I also feel manual editing is a very dangerous thing. The programs we are using and the parts we are making are in many ways not that complicated and don't require many of the cycles/macros available in the latest version CAM packages but they do have a lot of air moves between features of large curved parts it's easy to make a mistake when manually editing programs and put the head of the machine through the fixture. At least we have Vericut so I can check before it gets anywhere near the machine.
On the latest set of parts we have been working on there are a lot of drilled holes, by manually removing the automatically added clearance values I have cut 20-35 minutes off the cycle times of the different parts, with 10 parts per set that's a saving of over 3 hours per set!
It currently takes me about a day to edit each program like this. Although that is small compared to the overall saving that's 10 days I could have spent improving other programs, or on new work. Every time there is a change I have to redo the process. I had not though of using a macro to do some of the work I will look into his.
However if the post was right all that would go away.

I understand that in most case you have to pay for a post that does what you want all the time. Unfortunately the posts we were left with at the end of our grace period didn't even get all the basics right. Although I've edited out those problems there is no information on editing the posts and I am struggling to improve them further.

Thank you Maicky and Eagle Eye very useful information.

I had a sales and technical guy from Delcam in the other day and I was very impressed with there flexible approach to the whole subject and the price was comparable to upgrading Mastercam. I think I will talk to Openmind as well for completeness.