I am excited about this new series of blog post named Play-Good, that was inspired by Hol’s comment in regards to take a part from Solidworks and send it through Mastercam. I felt the model needed to be some kinda fun, and who don’t like LEGO (LEg GOdt(Meaning Play-Good)) Thanks to Ringenbach Lionel and 3D ContentCentral, ZIP and BAM there is a model.
The cadcamstuff.com on the side and the scaling is my work, but there is a purpose with this, felt this was a good opportunity to throw something about letters and engraving in the mix.
Solidworks into Mastercam:
We are going to export our Solidworks file as a Parasolid(.X_B is binary where .X_T is text what results in bigger file sizes, you get the choice to choose when saving in Mastercam(Parasolid is by the way owned Siemens who are big competition to both Solidworks and Mastercam, funny))
Mastercam does have to choice to import Solidworks directly, but there is some issues with missing features when importing assembly files, a risk we can not take.
Exporting as Parasolid has another advantage, believe it or not but Mastercam and Solidworks disagrees when it comes to views( Just can’t be easy), what is front in one is top in the other, and as a lot of combo Solidworks/Mastercam users, I do not have the Solid option in Mastercam (because I have Solidworks, duh!!) and therefor can not move the part itself, but luckily when exporting as a Parasolid file you can control this by setting a reference coordinate system in Solidworks. (We are later going to use “Work Coodinate System” in Mastercam to do the same)
Then when exporting the file we just need to make sure we choose the custom coordinate systems in the options tap when saving as Parasolid.
Now next step is just open our Parasolid file in Mastercam, and it is already placed the way we want it for 1st Operation.
1st. step is complete, next step is preparing the model for toolpaths but that is Part2, Stay tuned…..