Gibbs for mouldmakers and fixture builders

[Ryazan]

Having built injection molds for many years, I cannot recommend Gibbscam for 3-d machining. It does a poor job with vertical and near-vertical walls with the Z-axis frequently hunting up and down. I have had disastrous results doing lace-cuts in multi-cavity molds when using either patterns or the "translate toolpath" plugin- after completing the original path, it gallops off in the wrong location and busily mills miles away from where it should be even though the render screen indicates all looks fine. Also, the "shrinkage" calculation is way off. I have found this to be true on every computer and every version of Gibbs I've used in the last 3 years. (Draw a 20 inch circle, do a 1-1/2% shrink and then measure it. It should be 20.300, not 20.3046) The annoying aspect of all this is that Gibbs denies that there's a problem. The only other CAM program I've used is Surfcam, and for moldmaking it has it all over Gibbs. On the other hand, for 2-d work, Gibbs is great-picking geometry is a breeze.
That's my 2¢ worth.