On the SWWX Show Floor: Delcam

Delcam is probably the most important CAD company you rarely ever hear about. They do a lot interesting stuff with surfaces and solids over there in England.

They are here at SolidWorks World 2010 (SWWX) in booth 315, where they're not only showing off their initial CADM software integrated into SolidWorks, but also wanting to meet with any international SolidWorks dealer who would like to establish a distribution channel Delcam.

The spyshot below shows their CAM software running inside SolidWorks.


Delcam for SolidWorks does drilling and two- through five-axis milling. They tell me that future releases will add more features, such as turning, mill-turn and wire EDM.

Comments

[Jon Banquer]

As has been discussed on Delcam's Featurecam web forum, (as Delcam For SolidWorks is really Featurecam for SolidWorks)how well does Featurecam really take advantage of SolidWorks features and does this amount to a major break through in cutting part programming time? How much of the drudgery that is a frequent part of say 2 1/2 axis mill programming does Delcam For SolidWorks really eliminate? Is pocketing easily done just by clicking the appropriate feature in the SolidWorks history tree? The same question for contours. What happens when you import a dumb solid... is there still a time savings over non feature based CAM? How much time does a program like Delcam For SolidWorks really save on 2 1/2 milling vs. say HSMWorks or SolidCAM which aren't feature based CAM systems? How does Delcam For SolidWorks compare to a stand-alone program like DP Technology Esprit that is feature based and imports the features from SolidWorks, Solid Edge, Inventor and Pro-E? Right now in DP Technology Esprit the only major advantage gained is on holes.

These are the real world questions that need to be answered in regards to a new system like Delcam For Solidworks in order to make a decision one whether Delcam For SolidWorks is worth adopting.

The major question is how much time will Delcam For SolidWorks really save and how long will it take to setup?

The fact is that in the real world most machining job shops don't want to pay their CAM programmers to create elaborate customized machining libraries but rather want their CAM programmers focused solely on cranking out part programs.