[rkotowski]

I am just the IT person at my company who has never been involved with our Engineering Department and how they program using SurfCam. But, they are desperate and came to me with some questions. We bought 4 HAAS machines back in May. We brought them fully on-line maybe 2-3 weeks ago. Our Engineering/NC department has struggled with keeping up with programming for our orders.

The big problem now is we have 8,000+ standard parts that all need to be programmed for the HAAS...something they should have looked at several months ago...I know. Is there a best practice for trying to do this quickly to generate the programs within Surfcam? I know we probably have the drawings, but I don't know if we have them in Surfcam or not.

We have maybe 40ish standard size plates. There are about 7-12 variations of what these plates need done to them. We have 4 different steel types. Roughly.

I am trying to find out if there might be tools within Surfcam that might help to do this massive churning out of standard programs. Anything that might point me in a direction. My guess is that people have been through this before when buying a new machine. Our Engineering Department supposedly is taking a good hour to do each plate right now...which would take us years to do at that pace.

From my understanding, we would need to change:

Size of plate
Thickness of plate
Tooling for the job
Size of plate would change where the holes must go
Type of steel would change

I would appreciate any help whatsoever. I don't know all the terms and what Surfcam does, but I do programming for our ERP software. I have to believe there might be something built into Surfcam that might help us mass-produce these programs without having to do each one by scratch essentially.

Thanks in advance,

Ryan K

[marine1775]

Hello Ryan, how long has your company been using Surfcam?

Does your company use Solidworks? Surfcam can check for design changes within solidworks

What machines did you have before the Haas machines? The simple solution is just re-post the programs using the Haas post.

It is difficult to give you a precise answer without knowing all of the details but Surfcam can update operations if the original geometry changes. The button is inside the operations manager called "update operation". Keep in mind that you can copy and past within the operations manager and you can cut and paste from the operations manager from one Surfcam file to another new Surfcam file. All you would be doing then is using the "update operation" button(be careful using this, be sure to run verify completely). Or after pasting to new file just simply re-select geometry.

[rkotowski]

I am going to say we have used Surfcam for at 5+ years...slowly at first. But, I think the majority of this particular product line has always been done with a FarbCad program that we developed in-house.

We do have Solidworks and use that as our main Cad program.

I don't know maybe the correct specifics, but we have 5 or 6 Mitsubishi machines that we are phasing out with the new Haas machines.

Our old NC manager did all the programming for our machines. This is probably the first major machine change we have done since he left 5 or 6 years ago. And ,the Engineering manager is starting to realize maybe he has a little gap in programming for new machines. I have been helping him with some Visual Basic programs we have, but I have not any experience with Surfcam...but my resume might be changing a little I have a feeling...

I will pass along your info to the appropriate person and see what they say. I think this was a good start. If I have further questions, I will post it here.

Thanks a lot!!!

[Anders6612]

Convert the old programs. If its all in ISO, then it is easy to just use find and replace with
EditNc, it comes with Surfcam. Often, it is only the start end and cycles that need to be changed.

Probably, there is programs to purchase that do it automatically.