mastercam vrs. microvellum?

[steve cline]

I work in a shop that we use mastercam for cnc mill and also they have a 6X12 ft. gantry that we also machine cabnets. they use microvellum for the programing of the nest of cabnets and mastercam to convert to g and m code for the machine. my question is this, isnt there a program in mastercam that will take a 3D veiw of the cabnets and put them in a nest to the sheet size in a wire frame? I hope this makes sence to someone that can help. I would like some fire power to take to the owners so I can explain that we already have a program capable of creating what we need instead of running both, witch i feel is the bottleneck in this production. thanks for everything.

[ger21]

Imo, you should be using Microvellum to create your machine code. It may be an extra cost option, but it would be the most productive option.

For cabinet production, you want the nesting and g-code creation to be as automated as possible.

Nesting and g-code creation should basically be done with not much more than a single button click.

If you're exporting files, and manually converting those into g-code, you're not using your software efficiently.

[steve cline]

thank you. I know nothing about microvellum but aparently neither do the people that this company hire to run it. I thougt it should be capable of generating g-code but they telll me no. so they generate the geo and I import that to mastecam and need to ajust almost everything from there. it is a large waste of time in this production.

[ger21]

I've never used Microvellum, but I've been doing CNC cabinet production for 15 years.

From what I understand, Microvellum is one of the most powerful and flexible cabinet packages available, but that comes with a tremendous learning curve, and possibly a LOT of time spent setting it up properly.
As I said, you may need to pay for another module to get the ability to get g-code right from Microvellum.

Does you're version of MasterCAM do nesting? I use Alphacam, and what we do, is export individual .dxf files for each part, along with a .csv file with quantities, materials, and other pertinent info. This should all be done in one step from Microvellum.

In AlphaCAM, I select the CSV file, and all the parts are automatically nested and g-code for the nests created. No user intervention is required.

Once you have your cabinets ready to process in Microvellum, you shouldn't be spending more than 5 minutes getting the job ready to cut.