A CAM system is not something that you can simply click‐around in and achieve meaningful results. By their very nature they have technical content which needs to be explained.
And so we created this work book to help you achieve some practical toolpath results during your early use of SmartCAM.
It is not intended to be a substitute for formal training but we hope it will help you begin to understand how you will do things in SmartCAM.
Help is available if you need it. If there is anything you do not understand as you work through this material, do not hesitate to ask us to provide assistance.
Some of our screen capture images are admittedly a little small. If you hover over an image it will be temporarily scaled up for easier viewing.
We have presented tasks and actions that you are asked to applyusing red text within a shaded box and we have shown terminology associated with SmartCAM and SmartCAM usage in blue text.
Examples are Layer, Step, Level.
Where we would like you to know about a given topic we have presented it so that you can optionally expand it to read it so as not to disrupt the flow of your toolpath generation.
It's your preference if you want to read these things during your toolpath generation activity or come back and study them later.
We show information that you may wish to refer to more than once - generating CNC code for example - on separate web pages.
Links to those pages are included in the lower half of our pull-left menu over there on the right of your screen. ----------------->>>>>>>>
SmartCAM Milling family applications progressively add functionality. All of the functions and tasks you will apply are available in all SmartCAM Milling applications.
If you are trialing a higher-level application then this work book is a relevent base to begin your SmartCAM experience.
The Advanced Milling professional level application adds support for positional 4‐5 axis rotary axes, toolpath modeling
directly on solid / surface CAD models, High‐Speed / Adaptive toolpath and a level of 3D‐3 axis toolpath modeling for localized features.
Everything that you can achieve using Production Milling and Advanced Milling is
available in our premier milling system, FreeForm Machining, which adds 3‐axis toolpath modeling on complex solid and surface models.
But hey ‐ we won't make excessive use of sales‐guy words in an attempt to sell you our CAM system. We will shoot for the technical straight away.
Here we go, then.
The first thing to do is to download a Zip file containing the SmartCAM file for which you will model toolpaths.
Save the two files that are in the zip file to a folder of your choice on your PC.
You will be working on the following during this tutorial:
Job Setup
Machining closed and open regions
Profiling
Hole Operations
Let's start by opening the needed file.
Open SmartCAM Production Milling by double‐clicking the icon on your
desktop or left‐clicking the program in the SmartCAM program group in
your Windows Start button.
Left‐click the File > Open icon on the top toolbar, browse to the
folder in which you have saved the downloaded file, and open "Getting Started with SmartCAM Production Milling - Metric.pm5".
You will see a SmartCAM application screen layout similar to but not necessarily exactly the same as
the one below.
