Anyone use PartMaker Mill-Turn Or Mill
I am researching new cad/cam software for myself and the shop i work in.We have one swiss turn lathe(tsugami),2 ZT mori seiki mill turn,1 SL mori seiki, 1 doosan puma 2 axis lathe,1 A55 Makino Horizontal mill,1 A81 Makino Horizontal Mill,and 1 fadal Vertical mill.Has anyone had any experience using partmaker to program these machines and if so what has it been?The biggestproblem i have with our current software(Mastercam) is the posts.They seem to have nothing.Also is partmaker easy to draw in.I have found mastercam to be very easy to draw with as a cad package.Thanks for any input that you can give.
use caution before you buy partmaker
be careful before you purchase partmaker. for a one channel machine it will post fine as would any other package. once you get to two and three channel swiss style equipment the posts require heavy modifications to work properly. we have not used one multi channel machine where partmaker has posted correct numbers "out of the box". the machines would have crashed or just alarmed out.
for an example, after the post for an star sv-20 has been worked on for about two years it still requires hand editing so it can run properly once posted. this type of machine has been around since at least 1998. why doesn't this post work properly by now?
i do not believe that partmaker has spent time with the machine builders to be familiar with thier equipment. i know this for a fact from making calls to different machine tool builders.