CAD-CAM software

[dannysdad]

Our company is moving into the 21st Century finally. We are replacing our 22-year-old 8 machine MAZAK FMS system with a brand new one. We have been hand-writing EIA programs for the past 22 years and we also program in Mazatrol. We are in the process of updating to a CAD-CAM system and have looked at a few so far. ESPRIT, MasterCam and the Mazak MatrixCam system. We are also going to look at MazaCam, Griffo Bros., DelCam PartMaker, and InventorCam. Nobody here is familiar or has used CAD-CAM in any practical way. I was trained in school on ESPRIT (which I liked) and Gibbs (which I did not) and that is the extent of any expertise at this shop. My question is, if we got a Mazak based CAD-CAM system such as MazaCam, would we need an ESPRIT or MasterCam? The Mazak rep we saw used both MasterCam and the MatrixCam systems. The choices are almost overwhelming, does anybody have any suggestions on which way to go?

[TheBigJW]

If your moving into the 21st century avoid Mastercam. It's old school and getting worse in my opinion. The lathe software in Mastercam just introduced the ability to solid verify round boring bars. LOL. Before that they could only be square.

You will be very happy one day when you look back having decided to go with Esprit. Esprit is very capable and getting better all the time. They have recently been the choice of Mori for their high end machines.

Also see many threads on this forum about buggy Mastercam not fixing the version you buy if your annual maintenance contract expires before all the patches are released. You will be left with software that may not work

Esprit guarantees you get all the updates including the first release of the next version. This at least gets you all the patches for the version you paid for.

Also the prices charged for Mastercam are all over the place. Seems the mother ship will let the dealers charge whatever they can get from you. Our dealer jacked prices almost forty percent after we purchased here in Canada.

John

[69owb]

dannysdad,
If you are using Inventor I would defiantly look in to InventorCam. With it being full integrated into Inventor you can't go wrong. When we started shopping around for a different cam software are InventorCam dealer drove 3 hours to give us a live demo. The MasterCam dealer pretty much blew use off when we scheduled a go to meeting with them and when we finally did do a demo they had a black back ground so you couldn’t see anything on are projection screen asked him to change the background a couple times never did. We were not impressed with how dated the MasterCam software looked.