Sprut cam training

[bumperscoot]

Thanks for the advice TT350, but I really need to exhaust all possibilities before I can justify the loss on Sprutcam. I'm sure VM is a fantastic product, but sinking another $2-$5K into yet another unknown for me is simply not justifyable, yet...

Sturmflieger, thanks for the offer!

[TT350]

I feel your pain man!!!

[MarkWink]

bumperscoot,

Have you looked at the Sprutcam UK site. It has a few tutorials.

Also the Sprutcam forum, has been a help. The UK sales guy is quite helpful.

I'm successfully making parts with it on my Tormach. I can try to help if you post something.

Mark

[TT350]

The UK Sprutcam rep is a top notch guy but I
didn’t have time to bounce things back and
forth on the board.

The guys at Visualmill will return my emails
within two hours In most cases and I can
buy one on one phone support where they
linkup our PC’s and we work on a project together
and that was the part that helped me get off the
ground and make the learning curve almost painless.

[David Bord]

Tormach is working on a support program for Sprutcam now... Check the sprutcam forum for help... very supportive over there.

Also, the tutorials are very good, and the new release has some support for 4th axis work, and they are planning full implementation. The new release has been very good.

Im super happy with 2007 and the capabilities are very good.

David

[Mickey_D]

If you don't know anything about cam or even cad, sprutcam can be a little challenging from not having any handholding. The documentation that comes with it is technically correct but generally reads like a bunch of unix man pages - frustrating if you are starting from ground zero but once you have a general understanding of what you are doing they are very good for filling in the missing pieces.

As far as being buggy and doing stupid things like gouging parts, it is solid product. Lockups are extremely rare and usually come from user errors/inexperience, and once you get a basic understanding, it is very fast to generate good code with. Version 5.39 that was released a couple of weeks ago will do live 4th, and 5th axis on the mill, as well as having a lathe module that is really looking cool (still a work in progress). Now the cad part of sprut does give me flashbacks to autocad 7, I use an external cad program an import iges solid models.

I have used a couple of other products (Visual Mill 5 and Mastercam 9.1) and they all have their oddities (don't even mention bobcad 21), and a lot of learning the packages is learning how to work around them. To learn how to use sprut without having any live training available, I would suggest reading the user forums and not being afraid to ask questions, read the manual that came with it several times, and look for generic cam training material on the web and ebay. I have actually learned more about how to use sprut from a 3rd party mastercam training book than I did from the sprut documentation.

Any cam package is going to take a major investment in time or time and a lot of money to get good with, but for me sprut has been a solid package with a lot of capability that fit in the budget. I would love to have mastercam 10.3 with 5 axis capability, but my wife would kill me if I spent 20K plus on it.

[Mike Stevenson]

Why not buy Siemens/UGS NX6 CAD/CAM complete with basic machine verification for 20K instead? A lot more bank for your buck. They have over 4 milllion seats worldwide.

[brtlatjgt]

Try here: sprut.ca.

[Cairns]

I've got to throw my opinion into the mix as well. I've been a professional Software Engineer for the past 12 years, and I was a CAD technician for 6 years prior to that, so computer savvy is not something I lack. SprutCAM 2007 is one of the least intuitive software products I have ever used. Even when I manage to get it to do something right, I'll turn around minutes later and run the same simulation, having made no changes whatsoever and I won't get the same result. The tutorials don't match up with the software, nor do they work. I also purchased it bundled with my a Tormach and was counting on the Tormach folks to recommend a decent product, particularly since they turned their noses up at MasterCam when I was asking about it's compatability. Don't waste your money on the product.

As someone who was on a shoestring budget to begin with, SprutCam has really been a kick in the crotch.

[Cairns]

Originally Posted by Cairns I've got to throw my opinion into the mix as well. I've been a professional Software Engineer for the past 12 years, and I was a CAD technician for 6 years prior to that, so computer savvy is not something I lack. SprutCAM 2007 is one of the least intuitive software products I have ever used. Even when I manage to get it to do something right, I'll turn around minutes later and run the same simulation, having made no changes whatsoever and I won't get the same result. The tutorials don't match up with the software, nor do they work. I also purchased it bundled with my a Tormach and was counting on the Tormach folks to recommend a decent product, particularly since they turned their noses up at MasterCam when I was asking about it's compatability. Don't waste your money on the product. As someone who was on a shoestring budget to begin with, SprutCam has really been a kick in the crotch.

As a follow up, and after taking a step away from the keyboard for a bit. I'm finally able to get the SprutCam forums to respond and it looks like there is a good deal of help available there. I'm now a little more optimistic that I might not have pissed away a grand on software that I won't use. It sounds like there are people successfully using the code with my identical setup.

[MichaelHenry]

Cairns,

Tormach recently announced someone to handle in-house support for SprutCAM. See the Yahoo Tormach group for more info. It seems to be just email support now but maybe they can be encouraged to create a Tormach-SprutCAM support forum.

Mike