There is days you could wonder if CAD sales people have practiced extra hard on keeping a straight inviting face when they claim that there CAD software can import and export any of there competitors formats as if it was an extension of there body. Now, I’m not going to throw the CAD sales guy into the “used car salesman” category, he do not deserve that. To be fair, most CAD software will import what ever you throw at it, maybe just not to the standard you had expected. So before calling Tech support and either screaming in frustration or pleating for a better solution and maybe a comforting hug, lets look at the issue from a logical and practical side of things.
Import/Export Converting CAD from one system to another should be compared to translating from Russian to Greek with a dictionary where more than a few pages are missing. If you are trying to import a ProE file into Solidworks you need to realize that you are importing one competitor into another, and therefor in this example Solidworks only have what ProE gives them to work with in the conversion process. This goes for every CAD manufacture, so until we get all our different CAD extensions converted into one standard (keep dreaming, scooter) you should treat you import/export with some natural caution.
System Tolerance
So it is understood that there can be complications with translating the CAD data from one format to another. How about the system tolerance set up by the IT guy or you as a CAD captain?
~Mastercams System Tolerance page~ So imagine some guy(gentlemen, if he actually end up being your costumer) draws up some geometry on his 3rd world waterjet software, then saves it as DXF, and through a couple of sales reps. and a CAD Manager it ends up on your desk. Do you trust that the discount software that comes with a machine that think it is accurate when operating within +/-0.1mm? I didn’t think so. So what does this mean? well at least make sure that your templates and tolerances are set to proper scale. And again, you need some caution when dealing with incoming files.
Here is a couple of more things you might find interesting when exporting from Solidworks into Mastercam… A video is worth a thousands pictures
Coming up…
What you should know…..Export from Mastercam into Solidworks coming soon~Yep what about the other way around.
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