learning Surfcam vs. MasterCam

[Dan B]

No demo for it though, so you will have to trust me on your $15,000 choice.

My advice, based on my experience with Delcam, is not to trust a software that won't give you a demo.

I won't make that mistake again.

Dan

[mtlmnchr]

actually Gibbs will give you an evaluation copy if you are serious about the purchase.(contact Jason Heyse- Texas offline 888-21gibbs or 281-376-2003 )- ... Our company uses Cimitron E for the engineering side. I came onboard about a year ago, and they guys before me had never even used the manufacturing side of cimitron (bought and paid for it, just never used it).

I am now faced with trying to get it up and running as my project. I find cimitron to be very powerful, to a fault. it is so powerful that it has trouble doing simple operations. I am in the process of an eval on the lathe portion, possibly adding it as a solution. What I find is that fikus (the third party lathe /wire package) is also over "tweeked" and needs more support documentation inside like Cimitron E .
I used Gibbs cam from version 3.1(dos version) through v 5.507 and it is by far the most powerful easiest to manipulate easiest to learn cad/cam on the market ...but at a cost of nearly 17K $ us for full blown version, on top of our need for the engineering side ...I am struggling to fork out the PO for the money.


And to Rekd ...hey bro from what I have seen in my short time on this site you DA MAN !!!! ....but the AVERAGE shop doesn't do "complex machining" the average shop does complex set-ups based on machinetool limitation and does 2-2.5 and sometimes 3 axis machining