BYE BY MC4SW

[Mark VIII]

Yesterday we upgraded from MC4SW to the full version of MC. Oh, what a relief!

[Sticky]

What type of problems were you having with mcfsw that you won't have with standalone?

[SlaveCam]

I'm also curious about this topic. I've been thinking of installing MC4SW and use it instead because of fast prototyping in SW.

[David Colin]

I never tried MCfSW but i think you can't use Chooks add-ons. It can be a major restriction.

[Mark VIII]

Many problems. It's a flop. Crashes when exiting. Crashes during operation.  Constantly loses geometry on canned grooving cycles. Stock flip does not work at all when using wireframe geometry. Have to use outdated drivers with 3d connexion devises or it will not work at all with verify. That means you could not use it at all with SW or MC. 

SW blames MC. MC blames SW. MC blames 3D Connexion. 2 months of jerking around trying to get it to work. Countless hours wasted on the phone with tech support. Repair this, reinstall that. Nothing worked. And, the worst part is, we never even tried the mill module because we had so many problems with lathe.

On top of that, some features you do not get with MC4SW, like Viewsheets, MC drawing. Personally, I am not a huge fan of SW. I think it is overly bloated, cumbersome and highly repetitious.

[gcode]

2 hours ago, Mark VIII said:

Personally, I am not a huge fan of SW. I think it is overly bloated, cumbersome and highly repetitious.

Yes.. I've owned SW since 2001.. it used to be a nice modeling/drafting package.

Over the years it has morphed into a full CAD/CAM suite with multiple specialized modules.

It hasn't been the same since Dassault bought them out.

Several years ago there was rumbles than the parasolid kernel was being replaced in favor

of the Catia V6 kernel. The howls of protest from the dealers/userbase caused them to back off.

Dassault may want to turn SW into Catia Lite, but it is a huge cash cow and will lumber on for the foreseeable future.

I suspect Autodesk fusion is kicking their a$$ these days. Buying out HSMWorks was a smart move for AutoDesk

and SW is way late to the party with CamWorks.  I don't think I have ever met a happy CamWorks users

and blending it into SW isn't going to fix it.

I took 3 semesters of SolidWorks back in the day and was proficient  with it.

I don't use it as much these days, have not had any recent training and probably don't use 10%

of it's capabilities.

My employer dropped maintenance of their seats so I'm stuck at SW2017 at work.

I like MC2SW and use it for fixture design and fabrication. The 3D Connexion driver's issue

is aggravating. I thought it was solved, but apparently that is not the case.

[Mark VIII]

Funny you should mention Camworks. The shop I just started at was using Camworks. They never liked it and decided to switch to MC. That was a week before I arrived. They had no clue what they were getting into, since they had no MC experience. Since they use SW, they decided MC4SW was the right choice. Then...I walk in the door. I was expecting MC, not MC4SW. Been fighting it for 2 months and finally won

Camworks is made by Teksoft. I remember working at a shop years ago that had Teksoft standalone.  It was very limited. Feature based machining is little to no use for a job shop that does a variety of parts.

[htm01]

58 minutes ago, gcode said:

I don't think I have ever met a happy CamWorks users

 

they promised it would do everything, couldn't deliver

[gcode]

14 minutes ago, Mark VIII said:

Camworks is made by Teksoft. I remember working at a shop years ago that had Teksoft standalone

I owned a seat of 2.5D TekSoft back in the mid 90's. It was not bad.

It had some features back then that Mastercam still doesn't have.

Then they started buying code from India, called it ProCad 97 and put out 2 releases back to back that were

unusable. I left them for Mastercam and have never regretted it.

[Mark VIII]

Yeah, the version I used was Procad.

[gcode]

1 hour ago, Mark VIII said:

Yeah, the version I used was Procad.

It started being called Procad in 1997

Procad 97 was a train wreck

Procad 98 lit the train wreck on fire

I cut my loses and bought Mastercam in Dec 98

[Metallic]

It tends to crash 1/10 times i run the Add-in.  The lack of Chooks and customization can be frustrating. I tend to use MC standalone, but I will say model associativity is nice to have in SW. My thought is that if you need a complete PLM solution that does both things really well, talk to Siemens and get NX or similar.

[Mark VIII]

I could not agree 100% more Metallic. NX rocks. As for model associativity to SW, Mastercam direct will allow that within the standalone version. MC4SW is just a really really bad idea all around.

[gcode]

On ‎8‎/‎27‎/‎2018 at 3:54 AM, Mark VIII said:

Have to use outdated drivers with 3d connexion devises or it will not work at all with verify. That means you could not use it at all with SW or MC. 

SW blames MC. MC blames SW. MC blames 3D Connexion. 2 months of jerking around trying to get it to work. Countless hours wasted on the phone with tech support. Repair this, reinstall that. Nothing worked. And, the worst part is, we never even tried the mill module because we had so many problems with lathe.

I'm working on a fixture this afternoon using the milling module

I'm running SW2017, MCfSW019 Update 1, a Space Mouse Enterprise and 3DC drivers version 10.5.10 (the latest version)

Its simple work, drilling tapping and some light milling.

My Space Mouse is working fine with verify.

It didn't, the last time I tried it, but now it does.

I have no idea why, but I'm not complaining

[SlaveCam]

I would never design any fixturing in Mastercam if SW was around, unless it was very simple. IMO parametric modeling is a *must* for fixtures and prototypes. Too bad it feels like  MC4SW isn't even worth a try after reading this forum. I don't want any more buggy behavior than what's already there.

So, generating wireframe from models isn't going away anytime soon.

[gcode]

23 hours ago, SlaveCam said:

Too bad it feels like  MC4SW isn't even worth a try after reading this forum

Mark's complaints were aimed at the MCfSW lathe module. He states he has not tried mill

I have used lathe with out trouble, but it was simple family of parts work driven by a design table.

It took me several hours to build the deign table and program the first part. The next 9 parts took about 10 minutes each.

A very successful ( and profitable) job IMO

I use the mill module for fixture design and fabrication, a lot.

We have a lot of family of parts double rotary mill work that would go well on MCfSW but I can't use it for

production work as I am the only SW user in the organization.  That could cause real trouble down the road.

One reason I don't use MCfSW more is I'm used to using three monitors for my work now.

The Solidworks implementation of dual/multiple screens is complete cr@p IMO.

I always feel like I'm working on a postage stamp in SW, now that I'm used to spreading my work over 3 monitors in Mastercam. 

[Sticky]

I've been using mill only McfSW for the last few years, if you made me go back to standalone mastercam I would just quit mastercam all together and move to another package. I am mostly doing larger files with 50-200+ tool operations and multiple tool groups, and we are exclusively programming in the context of an assembly. There are some stability and crashing issues, I don't think they are any worse than standalone MC.

It is a long way from perfect, but so is standalone, and I can't ever move back to working in a non parametric environment.

[NW-Integrex]

I used to run Camworks, and would have to say that it is a pretty good product if you understand how it works. I also will say that I only used the Feature Based Machining a couple of times. I like to drive my own cutter path, so it worked well, as we did our own post processor changes. That being said, I now run MC, and we bring in most of our files as STP files and then work with them. On the Integrex, this works well. Solidworks, like Catia is a great modeling tool, but we have found that bringing in the model in a neutral format and then working it has less issues.